Procedural Planet Textures in C++

Code

Project:   Procedutex

Reading time ~1 minute

In interactive media (ie. video games), procedural generation is gaining momentum, and I think it’s a really cool concept; making computers do the art (or level design).

Another thing I think is cool is outer space, especially planets. The best of both worlds collided back in the early 2010’s with an old iPad app called Planetary. It made very good use of procedural generation techniques to make life-like planets on the screen. Unfortunately that app doesn’t exist anymore (although the source code is available).

That app inspired me to try to make procedurally generated planets. I found an opportunity to do so as a grad school research project. The result is the library Procedutex, which can procedurally generate textures of many kinds, although I mostly used it to demonstrate planetary textures.

You can read more about it at the project’s page, or you can get the source directly from GitHub (code is Windows only).