I wonder if anyone has generated planets by running a geological simulation - plates, subduction zones, vulcanism, erosion.... etc.
Dwarf Fortress does.
This is the "Simpsons Did It" of video games.
Planet Generation - Part I
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Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#22One approach that you might want to try is to generate the planet using spherical harmonics. If you draw random coefficients for those harmonics, their distribution (in particular their rate of decay) will dictate how "coarse" the terrain looks.
Edit: scratch that, you need an ungodly amount of parameters to get anything fine... works better for designing asteroids
Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#23I wonder if anyone has generated planets by running a geological simulation - plates, subduction zones, vulcanism, erosion.... etc.
Dwarf Fortress does.
Having used a few cheat codes to instantly see what every voxel is composed of... the generation isn't great. It's just spheres of certain materials, as well as x-shaped veins. It feels natural when you're randomly chipping it out, but when the curtain gets pulled back, it's not as impressive.
Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#24Very cool result! I've been wondering about applying the height-maps that you get from Perlin/Simplex directly to the vertices of a planet, for 3D terrain. I'd imagine that the cube mapping approach might not be perfect for this because of the irregular distance between vertices. The geodesic dome would probably work, but I have no idea how you would generate noise for a shape like that.
I've used a cubemap approach to render procedurally generated asteroid geometry and it works pretty well. I start by generating the heightmap using 3D simplex noise, Then when rendering I use a domain shader to offset the vertices of an icosphere along the normal vector according the the height in the heightmap. http://imgur.com/rpKalpk I've got a bunch of other procedural content generation blog entries over at http…
That's an impressive result! My worry was that it would become more obvious if I were to skimp on the poly count of the shape. Doesn't seem to have been an issue for you.
Thanks for the links, I'll definitely check them out.
Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#25I wonder if anyone has generated planets by running a geological simulation - plates, subduction zones, vulcanism, erosion.... etc.
I wondered the same thing a while ago, wanting to do so for my own purposes. I found this a while back.
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/623145-terrain-generation-with-...
I'm hoping to find time to use it myself, and possible extend it. Thankfully its open source.
Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#26Very cool result! I've been wondering about applying the height-maps that you get from Perlin/Simplex directly to the vertices of a planet, for 3D terrain. I'd imagine that the cube mapping approach might not be perfect for this because of the irregular distance between vertices. The geodesic dome would probably work, but I have no idea how you would generate noise for a shape like that.
You'd actually generate noise just the same way as I used 3D Simplex noise. I am unsure on UV mapping though as I have not experimented with it yet when using geodesics. Instead I just escaped the problem by using a collapsed cube :)
Ahh, I get it. Took me a couple reads of the code to see what was going on, but that is pretty cool. Thanks for the info!
Re: Planet Generation - Part I
#27Very cool result! I've been wondering about applying the height-maps that you get from Perlin/Simplex directly to the vertices of a planet, for 3D terrain. I'd imagine that the cube mapping approach might not be perfect for this because of the irregular distance between vertices. The geodesic dome would probably work, but I have no idea how you would generate noise for a shape like that.
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