It went horribly wrong
Programming can be just as frustrating as it is fun. While creating the latest game I ran into a few bugs that left my hex planet in a horrible state.
During my attempt to create the planet I first ran into this - not so desirable - effect:
Turned out the winding of some of the triangles in the planet was not in counter-clockwise order so when GL_CULL_FACE was enabled these triangles were culled by GL. So, had to make some corrections to the code to ensure the same winding as it makes it simpler to do collision detection and lighting.
Then when I ported the planet into my production code I got this very "Dark side of the moon" effect.
While it was not the effect I wanted it looks pretty cool. Turned out that I forgot to attach the proper shader to the model - so it was an easy fix. In the end it looked like this (without proper texturing):
By the way - the code to generate the HexPlanet was inspired by this whitepaper and accompanying source code (which I converted from C++ to Objective-C) created by Joel Davis. I will release the source code for the HexPlanet converted to Objective-C on GitHub soon.