m. c. de marco

Libnoise is “a portable, open-source, coherent noise-generating library for C++,” with which you can generate random planets. Here’s a gorgeous example of what you can do using Terragen and Celestia for rendering the libnoise output.

Today is the day for the long, long-awaited Terragen 2 Technology Preview. Check out the docs to see what Terragen does now. I’ve already spotted a procedural planet in there…

Via the TerragenMac mailing list: Planetside has announced a release date of December 15th for a preview of its long-awaited Terragen 2 landscape rendering software.

Via the TerragenMac mailing list: new images are up in the Terragen 2 Gallery at planetside.

This tutorial is based on what I learned from the TERRA-Dreams Planet Tutorial #1. (Note the correction at Ashundar if you plan to follow that tutorial.)

Update: Jayhawker has added an extended tutorial with lovely illustrations to the Ashundar tutorials page.

First of all, the pretty picture:

I have one image so far in my gallery at Ashundar. I read a few tutorials for making planets with Terragen, but still had to figure out several things on my own in order to generate the picture. I’m hoping to write my own planet tutorial before I forget what I did.

I found Terragen back when I was looking for mapping software like Grass. You can feed a real elevation map into Terragen as well, but the focus is more on art than accuracy.