[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.