[jengamaster]

Very cool result! I've been wondering about applying the height-maps that you get from Perlin/Simplex directly to the vertices of a planet, for 3D terrain. I'd imagine that the cube mapping approach might not be perfect for this because of the irregular distance between vertices. The geodesic dome would probably work, but I have no idea how you would generate noise for a shape like that.

[mrsharpoblunto]

I've used a cubemap approach to render procedurally generated asteroid geometry and it works pretty well. I start by generating the heightmap using 3D simplex noise, Then when rendering I use a domain shader to offset the vertices of an icosphere along the normal vector according the the height in the heightmap.

http://imgur.com/rpKalpk

I've got a bunch of other procedural content generation blog entries over at http://www.junkship.net, including this entry http://www.junkship.net/News/2011/11/13/building-steam-with-... which covers a lot of similar ground to the parent article.

[jengamaster]

That's an impressive result! My worry was that it would become more obvious if I were to skimp on the poly count of the shape. Doesn't seem to have been an issue for you.

Thanks for the links, I'll definitely check them out.

[shanee]

You'd actually generate noise just the same way as I used 3D Simplex noise.

I am unsure on UV mapping though as I have not experimented with it yet when using geodesics. Instead I just escaped the problem by using a collapsed cube :)

[jengamaster]

Ahh, I get it. Took me a couple reads of the code to see what was going on, but that is pretty cool. Thanks for the info!