Celestia Forums

Are there any good procedural texture generators I can use to make planet textures?

I've run out of ideas with the "frankenstein method" of planet texturing.

And I'd prefer it if it had a point-and-click interface, as I despise command line-only applications. Sorry.

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A powerful (free) procedural texture generator is: http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/. Notice that the program allows the texture render's preview on 3D meshes, thus you can see what happen with your texture on a sphere http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/?PAGE=FEATURES

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john Van Vliet wrote:mapzoneeditor looks good for a FPS or for fleshing out a area in a game or pov-ray. But for a planet ?

It might work if you push finished the texture through parts of the "making a planet: gimp" tutorial here on this forum, specifically, the parts where you use the resynthesizer to fix the poles.

EDIT: Just spent hours checking it out. It's not very good at making planets.

Have you tried Genetica? They offer a 30-day trial, plus they also offer their free viewer. The texture packs they have are free, tileable, and look pretty decent. Some work may be needed to do on them in GIMP, but I like what I've gotten so far. Its setup looks similar to what you've displayed.

A note on the Viewer: It does a lot less than the program (obviously), but you can still do some image manipulation with it. And if the trial period runs out on you, you can take textures from the program and move them to the viewer so you can still use them. Anyway, my 2 cents...

-M-

Question: Which would be better at making planets, a procedural texture generator, or a fractal texture generator?

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The term "procedural generator" is most often used to indicate that a display program or game uses a software procedure to generate planets and stars "on the fly". They aren't created until you visit them. The software generates random details at higher and higher resolution as you get closer and closer to a surface, but it creates only as much detail as is needed where it can be seen. The results usually are cached so you'll see the same thing when you visit the same place at a later time.

This is unlike static maps like those Celestia uses, which are created in advance and have a fixed resolution. Planets will only look better close-up if someone has previously spent the time needed to generate maps with high enough resolution.

As John pointed out, procedural generators often use fractal algorithms to generate their details. Since they have to generate their results in realtime, the algorithms usually are simpler than those used for static maps.