In this blog post I will describe how my planet terrain erosion simulator handles rock layers and deformation of layers. Here is a picture of the current results:

You can clearly see the multiple layers and their deformation. Each type of layer has its own erosion intensity, which influences how the…

In my previous blog post I described a simple approach for handling snow accumulation in an erosion simulator. In this post I will present new improved results, as well as a mechanism for reducing snow accumulation in areas with significant amounts of fluid. Now it looks like this:

The most obvious …

The last few days I added a simple approximation of snow accumulation to my full-scale planetary erosion simulator. It looks like this up close:

And far away:

The basic algorithm is similar to the “talus” or thermal weathering approach which I already use for ensuring that sediment does not exceed it…

In this post I will share a new technique I developed for interpolation/upsampling of data. This method is able to produce interesting looking results such as this from very low resolution input:

This image was generated by applying the interpolation technique recursively to random white noise data …

In the last few weeks I have been working on adding impact craters to my planet generator. These are an important part of the terrain for many astronomical objects. I aimed to produce realistic craters within the existing terrain generation and erosion framework.

Preview of current results:

I tried t…

I've been working a lot the last month on making the planetary terrain generation more easily parameterizable with spatially-varying data. By adding more variation the hope is to avoid the "No Man's Sky effect" where planets are the same everywhere on the surface.

The variations include:

• Base low-fre…

I've been working a lot recently on improving the graphics of my planet simulator. In addition to terrain texturing, water rendering, screen space reflections, and cascaded shadow maps, I most recently have added realistic atmosphere rendering using this approach from Epic Games.

It uses a few diffe…

The past few weeks I have been working on adding erosion simulation to my planet generator/renderer, which you can read more about in this blog post. I wasn't confident that this could actually be done, but I believe to have some success in this area.

The general i…

Something I've wanted to do for a very long time is to create an engine for rendering solar systems and planets of realistic scale. Over the past 3 months I built the technology required to make it happen. I had to completely overhaul my game engine to deal with the problem of massive scale.

Compute…