Procedural Solar System
Work in progress project that procedural generates stars, planets and moons to form a solar system.
​
Moon Generation
Moons generate through a three stage GPU compute shader pipeline. The process begins with the generation of a sphere mesh using a sphere generation compute shader that outputs vertices with a specified segment resolution and radius. Subsequently craters are formed using parabolic math to create realistic rims and cavities. A bias towards smaller craters is used for realism. Finally layerd fractal noise dispalces the generated vertices to create a varied and more interesting surface introducing ridges and finer details.
Planet Generation
Planets generate using three compute shaders. First, the planet dispatches the same sphere shader as the moon. This sphere is then deformed using the planet shader. Noise and masks combine to generate continents, rivers, valleys and other geographical features. Vertexes are coloured in this shader based on their location and its gradient. Parameters can be tweaked to alter characteristics of generated planets. Finally a water shader crates the oceans with adjustable murk, scattering etc...
,
,