Devlog #2: Starkeep - Generating Planets

Building out some planets

Hi Substack

I’ve been working on Starkeep for about 1/2 days now. And I’m starting to get the in the flow of things. I started off with rendering planets of various biomes. As of now I’m working with the following biomes:

• Temperate

• Frozen

• Desert

• Volcanic

• Oceanic

Here’s a quick render of how they currently look like. I’ll write down below the methods that I went through.

First attempt: Noise maps

I wanted to find out how to generate planets that look good. So I started by looking at algorithms I know best: Perlin Noise.

I figured I could use a noise map, to recreate surface areas of a planet. Something similar to the image below. For each pixel of a texture, I’d get a noise value (between 0 and 1), where the higher values would be high altitudes (let’s say white mountain peaks) and the lowest values would be the deepest oceans.

For those interested, my overly simplistic implementation essentially looked something like this:

Now that kinda worked. But results were not as sexy as I imagined, but it worked. But a big part of me wanted to model gas giants (think Jupiter). More the aesthetic I was going for.

Current technique: FBM Shader

FBM stands for Fractal brownian motion. Which I’ve learned the existence of through The Book of Shaders. Now I don’t understand the math nearly as well as I should, but following the guide led me to some decent looking planets. The textures we’re seeing there are definitely more along the lines of what I’m hoping.

For those wondering, this is the kind of looks that could _theoretically_ be generated (image from the book of shaders).

This still remains more of an aspiration than a reality, but I think some progress has been made overall.

Thanks for listening !