Procedural Planets, Heightmaps and Textures

Posted by henryprescott on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by henryprescott
Published on 2010-11-02T23:00:59Z Indexed on 2012/10/25 11:17 UTC
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opengl

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textures

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cubemap

I am currently working on an OpenGL procedural planet generator. I hope to use it for a space RPG, that will not allow players to go down to the surface of a planet so I have ignored anything ROAM related. At the moment I am drawing a cube with VBOs and mapping onto a sphere.

I am familiar with most fractal heightmap generating techniques and have already implemented my own version of midpoint displacement (not that useful in this case I know).

My question is, what is the best way to procedurally generate the heightmap. I have looked at libnoise which allows me to make tilable heightmaps/textures, but as far as I can see I would need to generate a net like this.

Leaving the tiling obvious.

Could anyone advise me on the best route to take?

Any input would be much appreciated.

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