Terragen algorithms, procedurally generating a planet with LOD in real time

Started by dontforget86, April 27, 2010, 03:12:55 AM

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dontforget86

Hi everyone,

I've been researching into real-time procedural planet generation for games and from what I have read on this forum it seems terragen 2 can procedurally generate terrain for a planetary surface and uses a LOD system so that you can actually move from space to the planet's surface (not sure of the particulars of how this is done in terragen). I'm wondering if the algorithms or overall system Terragen uses could be adapted to work in a game? Generally I believe planets are usually made by finding the camera position and subdividing nodes (like tiles) based on distance. Is that how terragen works?

Since I imagine a lot of people on this forum are well informed about procedural terrain generation I would also love to know about any code libraries etc. that have the kind of algorithms terragen provides but for real time use. I learned a fair bit from following the Infinity: Quest for Earth development journal; that game is procedurally generating entire solar systems. Pretty impressive.

I am primarily interested in just the terrain generation side of it (not rendering, at least for now).

On a more realistic level I imagine that terragen could be used to create meshes for objects like asteroids without much difficulty?

Thanks a lot for your time!