I am going to see how to make the craters of a planet using images maps. I'll post what I can figure out here.
Here is a planet with the image of Europa mapped onto the surface. The image is available here.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/3d_resources/assets/jup2vss2.html
The tgd file is made using a second planet to map the image onto. I deleted the atmosphere. I used the Europa image for color and displacement. This is about as far as I can go with this. The crater image map has to be seamless. Map the image onto the second planet using spherical mapping. I used a default shader for the image.
thanks for sharing...
N.KAID
I tried out using fake stones with negative scale. I used surface layers with voronoi cell shaders for input and displacement. The result is not rounded craters, but close. Here is the tgd file.
Exploring image map craters? Too easy!!! Just find a height map of some craters (Map-A-Planet is a good place to start) and slap it on the terrain with displacement!
That's one way. I am trying to make the image map small, and the rest procedural. This will allow complex variation, but uses small amount of RAM.
another easy way is to just use a simple paint shader and paint the craters on to the terrain then ad a displacement shader