Procedural Planet Video

January 29, 2010 by Dave
Filed under: Procedural Planet, XNA 

Here’s a video showing the space-to-surface transition, as well as the tank driving around a bit. I’m pretty happy with how it looks, but there are a lot of things that still need to be fixed:

  • Seams on neighboring nodes when they’re at a different level of detail.
  • Lighting on node edges is wrong since the normal map generation isn’t currently taking into account neighboring height values, resulting in very visible node edges.
  • Need to add some noise to the texture generation so the transitions are less obvious. This should also help minimize the repeating patterns.
  • Normals are too “strong” at high altitudes. I think I need to change the normal strength based on the quad tree level.
  • Need to add morphing between LOD changes to eliminate popping.

I think those changes will improve things quite a bit. But first I’m going to plug the atmospheric scattering shader back in. I’m currently using Sean O’Neil’s method, and that’s what I’m going to add back for now. But I’m not really happy with it and plan to give Precomputed Atmospheric Scattering a go.

So, here’s the video…

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Comments

3 Comments on Procedural Planet Video

  1. K on Fri, 29th Jan 2010 4:03 pm

    2. You should have your sound developer check out Liquid Mind (an alias for Chuck Wild, Los Angeles-based composer/producer/instrumentalist).

  2. Sven on Thu, 4th Feb 2010 6:32 am

    3. Hi Dave,

    first of all: Very nice work!

    I’m currently working on a planetary rendering system for a game I’m working on.
    Since I can not figure out how to generate a fractal texture for the heightmap and use it in my geoclipmap engine,
    I started searching the web and found your blog.

    I read your postings with pleasure and now I’m wondering, whether you could send me your source or at least some snippets of
    the generation of your fractal patches. If this is not possible, could you explain me how you create them and implement the
    “viewing frustum fractal patch” relation including the distance related increase of detail?

    I hope my kind of funky english makes some sence to you ;-)

    Best regards – Sven

  3. Myth on Thu, 27th May 2010 11:52 am

    4. You’ve done a brilliant job on the way you’ve got this looking and how smooth your tank runs on a mesh the size of this. Would it me possible to take a look at some of your code?

    Thanks,
    Myth.

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