6 or 7 years ago, the hobbyist procedural planet scene was booming, but most of the big players from back then don't seem to have the time to dedicate to it anymore (sadly, myself included).

I do however maintain a list of interesting efforts/blogs/etc. over on my (mostly defunct) blog. Hopefully you find some of them useful, and if you have any suggestions for corrections or additions to that list, please let me know.

haven't looked at swiftcoder's list yet

been coding for ages, but i'm poor and i'm a bastard, so i've spent decades eg. not being able to do things because i don't know how to install an sdk, et c. because nobody will tell me (truth - it took about four years for other coders to decide i deserved to know how to install the synthedit SDK with borland fclt, because they didn't want a helpful nice person coding all kinds of stuff that would take the money out of their pockets.. so they waited until they'd milked the market)

so - i have NO idea how other people do things. here's what i say (fwiw) -

fields that attract - games, music - are the more competitive and have the most trouble with good resources. it's not like gamedev or other game lists suck, but gamedev is the last place i would look for a tutorial. ymmv.

though i am inexperienced with it, i am thinking that it is better to pursue the demo scene - i'd think the people are less authoritarian, more egalitarian, and more willing to concentrate on sharing information that actually means something, and efficient methods. i feel like the methods in more commercial venues are babyfood, dumbed down and watered down..


....here's what i know about procedural planet, but i *know* my way is the slowest, and that it can be done much faster. i'd start with inigo quilez, and follow links for demo scene.. people who are concerned with the pith -


my planet (very very slow)
start with 3d perlin noise. simple concept.

more difficult: linear interpolation sucks for perlin (any # of dimensions)
other people say using cosine interpolation or s-curve interpolation (d = d * d * (3 - d - d)) iirc... looks good. i think it sucks. i think to look good, you need cubic interpolation.

cubic interpolation with 3d perlin ... HORRIBLE (it's 2nd order interpolation, so you need to do like 20 odd cubics to get one single pixel)



there are other ways of 3d spherical noise i have not explored - mapping six "square" regions to the sphere, like a plush cube.. or tesselating the surface with triangles (perlin's next noise method.. simplex iirc? i don't remember..)

of course, i do all rendering on cpu not gpu.. translating a perlin sphere to a 4096*2048 map took around two minutes on my old computer.

maybe it's faster with volumetric rendering, or something, but i have yet to find any source telling me how to do things efficiently.

i'd hit the demo scene, or, look at the age of my profile here.. in another 10 years you could still know only as much as me.. (well maybe you are a normal person who can buy books, i can't).

I would also checkout: http://vterrain.org/

EDIT: So I've looked around through all the helpful stuff you sent me and I'm guessing I'm discovering the cold hard truth that learning this C++ stuff is not simple. I'm not a stupid person, but I always find it easier being taught via teacher or via video, and that's what I'm kinda looking for. But any of these resources help, probably just will take me a bit longer hehe.

Have a look at some OpenGL tutorials and try it out.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/667482-modern-opengl-tutorials/