My Procedural Planet Renderer

I intend to use this as the basis for an Elite inspired space trading/exploration/combat game I am developing. It allows an entire planet to be rendered from space all the way down to a few meters from the surface. It incorporates geometry clipmaps for the detailed terrain, atmospheric scattering, water using planar reflections and uv perterbation, HDR, texture splatting and billboard particle clouds. Features I have yet to implement include surface objects (trees, rocks, buildings), more detailed texturing (at the moment only two are used) and non procedural content (space ports, major cities, and a base height map for modelling known planets).

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Procedural
• Planet
• Renderer
• Computer
• Graphics
• Game
• LOD

[faro0485]

Quite interesting. What pc setup were you using?

[billw2008]

Yeah its a high spec pc! At the moment the min specs are an 8000 series nvidia card, and preferably a dual core CPU. But I haven't spent any time optimizing for lower spec machines yet, if this turns into a game its something I will have to do.

[LuxorCZ]

Can i ask you how you was moddeling it?We need to know it please.

[vwr0527]

I have a great idea: Procedural alien city generation! eh?

[DrummerLordProdigy]

What program did you use?

[InfiniteUniverse88]

It looks like two stars, if one of the stars is a red dwarf then it would emit mostly red light making the water it illuminates appear red.

[7BeAsT9]

Elite II Frontier would look awesome with this planet renderer

[MrDobilina]

What is this coded in / for.

How long did it take?

I'm trying to make a procedurally generated planet (not to this detail level) in a month in xna but i cant figure out how to code spherical co-ordinates

[DeLe1000]

Doesn't matter the class of star, it is a light phenomenon. Look at 1:35: is illogical, light from water is red and star are white. Doesn't make sense.

[qwecjc]

maybe it's a red dwarf, a red giant, or a K type star

[iamawesometoo]

This looks absolutely great! The thing is, it looks so great that it is a little less than realistic. I know that you probably already intend to, but the reflection off the water is far too great, and the land textures are not varied enough to seem like they are at different elevations. I would reccomend using a single texture base per planet, and specifying different methods to distort and blend the base to fit in with the surrounding textures.

[BloodxGusher]

The only problem I have with this engine thingy is that it is really short to get into outer space.