Celestia Forums

I've been searching around for procedural texture generators lately. My hope is that maybe it will be possible to generate a pseudo-realistic looking planet based on it's size, type of star it orbits, and other random factors.

So far, I haven't been able to find any tools with source code that can generate a texture, but I did run across an excelent photoshop plugin.

It's called "LunarCell" by Flaming Pear software. I downloaded the demo and generated a few planets quickly with the randomize button and saved them. Each planet took about 15 seconds to generate at 1280x1024 resolution.

While the pictures I saved appear shaded on a sphere, it's also possible to save individual textures from a generated planet as a flat map. Different parts of the planet texture can be saved individually too, such as the cloud map, bump map, land color map, etc.

If you have photoshop, I would suggest you check this plugin out.
http://www.flamingpear.com/index.html

Here are the pictures:

http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet1.jpg
http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet2.jpg
http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet3.jpg
http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet4.jpg
http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet5.jpg
http://aaron.cyberfreakout.com/flamingpear/planet6.jpg

I mainly use it for the spectural masks and masking off the tops and bottoms for a smoother transition...Nice work...

Aaron,

Have you looked at NetPBM?
It's a collection of graphics manipulation and format translation utilities.

There are two of them that ought to be modifiable to do what we want:
ppmforge (generates clouds, planets and starry skies)
pgmcrater (generates a cratered terrain)

ppmforge generates "finished" worlds, but I'd think it should be modifiable to generate simple cylindrical projections instead. Of course, I haven't looked at the source code...

NetPBM is on sourceforge at http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/