[Prototype] Procedural Planet Generation

critic

Been fiddling with procedural generation for some time, I usually fallback to this project when there is some free time or need a break from more generic stuff. Below are a few videos of the evolution of the planet generator, it's made in Unity, maybe one day I make a game with it.

dreampunchboy

Very very cool. Are you going to add LOD and go in deeper?

critic

That's the plan, I might do another iteration of the sub-division algorithm before I do that though. Probably dividing a cube from the beginning instead of folding 6 faces.

Tuism

This is suuuuper pretty :) I like! though I wondered why you didn't zoom in any further than you have? Even if the details aren't so high I'd have liked to see it go in :)

Are you planning to game it?

critic

You can download the prototype and zoom in as much as you want :)

I guess i didn't think of it at the time of recording, the scale that is shown in the vid is about the scale that prototype can be used in a game and look decent.

As for making a game out of it, sure at some point.

critic

New video in the OP, happy with the coding run that produced this, will probably come back to this at some time in the future.

critic

Another self-bump, updated the OP, clouds and wind in the latest update.

UberGeoff

Could you not sell this as a tool on the Unity asset store? Could you wrap it up as a modular tool?

Elyaradine

Hey, I recently saw some rad stuff that someone else was making. I don't know if that'd inspire you to juice yours up or something.

http://oskarstalberg.com/game/planet/planet.html

critic

@UberGeoff, I thought about it before and it's not really presentable as a Unity Asset, there are a few reasons. A lot of code is experimental, it contains some assets bought from the store, a lot of work would be needed to get it into a presentable state and I don't really feel like maintaining it.

@Elyaradine, I'm familiar with that style, most recently it was used in Imagine Earth, there is a game a few years older that pioneered that style, I just can't seem to recall the name, it used an ico-sphere iirc.

UberGeoff

Ok.

+ How much is "a lot" of work? 3 weeks?

critic

@UberGeoff, let's say it's ~3 weeks of work and I'm willing to do it, what do I do about the code that I can't make public, there is a shader that I bought from the Asset Store and it's an essential part of the program?

UberGeoff

OK, sorry, Im new to the store - so I'm not 100% sure about these types of asset store "rights" issues.

Cant you put a cost sharing agreement in place with the shader creator? Or is that not allowed?

critic

I suppose there is nothing stopping me and the other guy of making some agreement, thing is he sells the shader for more $$$ than I would ask for the planet generation asset. Anyway thanks for the suggestion, I will keep it in mind. :)

UberGeoff

Ok. NP.

I see these planet gen "assets" are pretty popular - so i think yours has a good chance to make some $$$.

GL and HF..!

critic

So I went back to my planet generator this weekend, wanted to fiddle with cloud generation a bit. Decided to make a new Unity project and clean everything up, ended up converting my current 'loaned' atmospheric scattering to pure ray traced one. That took about two days and the visual difference is negligible, however a rare seam problem got resolved and I moved away from some placeholder code for specific faces. Then it was back to volumetric cloud rendering, I now have a functional shader and build. That was an eventful few days...

Kobusvdwalt9

@critic This might interest you. I can across it while I was trying to do something completely different with skyspheres.

Link : http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/content/procedural-planets/