This low poly planet générator is a solo made project. It was destined to be used in an abandonned game project. I have developped it in C++, and used Nazara engine to make the render of the generated planets.
To create this generator, i was greatly inspired by this article :
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/
The generation is made in several steps :
- Making an ICO sphere rhar is used as base surface, and adding some data on each vertex (moisture, offset, biome …)
- Define a first vertex offsex with a 3D perlin noise, that allow to define bounds between water and land.
- The small water area are lakes, and the bigests are ocean.
- The elevation is calculed on each vertex according to the distance to the edge of the nearest ocean while keeeping the lakes flat.
- WHen the relief is defined, it’s now possible to go down to the ocean from each vertex, by following the edges between each points. That’s how the rivers are drawn.
- The moisture level of a vertex is defined by his distance to the nearest river.
- When the moisture and the elevation are builds, the biome can be defined.
With all theses informations given by the generator, it’s now possible to build the render of the planet, by giving a color to each biome.
You can found the project on github : https://github.com/larnin/PlanetGeneration