Hi all :) This weekend I need to create a procedural planet for a local work, so I went straigth to tinkering with built in procedural textures, sadly there where no simple combination of procedurals that provide me satellite like view of planet surfaces, in order to achieve that a procedural should have some desired properties:
It should have iso - lines that remind same high levels, like coastal lines or lines like rivers, erosion and features like that. (the closer built in procedural that currently have similar features in Blender is stucci at high octaves and turbulence and the magic one, but is not enough and are quite self similar at every scale) It should be fractal like but should not be very similar among scales because otherwise you get very similar and smooth detail at every scale (like currently happen with Cloud porcedural) It should provide detail enough at all scales in order to avoid increasing the number of noise octaves beyond wthat's currently blender have built in, for planet surfaces extremely close shorts should be made to the surface or build very big spheres, and from far away any smoothness will be inmediately spotted. The usual approach is to use lots of layers and composited procedurals in order to achive that, with the corresponding slow down, and trial and error approach or use some of the excelent directly aviable satellite pictures of planets (not an option for people offline like me). So I end up creating a new procedural: "Planet" texture, that has all the needed features and more, it provides enough detail at every scale and more important, is not very similar at different scales so zooming in will give you an entirely different view with new details and features in the terrain, it also have iso-lines and features that simulate erosion, rivers, platforms, and more , all using a single procedural!!! It also have a very interesting feature: at small scales it have a curl like behaviour, and adding more octaves, will add more small curls, unlike the current Magic texture that only add detail to the existent loops, this will prove usefull for rocks, and texture driven flow for particles. As always a picture worth a thousand word, judge yourself, I think this texture is worth integration ;) Hope you like it. I have send my post to Lapinou to be uploaded in my site soon. Cheers Farsthary _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers