New “Planet” procedural texture

Hi all 🙂

This weekend I had to create a procedural planet for a local work, so I went straigth to tinkering with buil- in procedural textures…

Soon we will have a very cool OceanSim texture or simulator but what about planets? sadly there were no simple combination of procedurals that provides me that (surface with the desired characteristics):

It should have iso – lines that remind same – high levels, like coastal lines or lines like rivers, erosion and features like that  (the closer built-in procedural that currently have similar features in Blender is stucci at high octaves and turbulence and the magic one, but it’s not enough and are quite self similar at every scale)

It should be fractal like but should not be very similar among scales because otherwise you get very similar and smooth detail at every scale (like with Cloud procedural)

It should provide detail enough at all scales in order to avoid increasing the number of noise octaves beyond what blender currently offers with built-in procedurals; and for planet surfaces extremely close shorts should be made
to the surface or build very big spheres wher from far away any
smoothness will be inmediately spotted.

The usual approach is to use lots of layers and composited procedurals
in order to achieve that, with the corresponding slow down, and trial and
error approach or use some of the excelent directly aviable satellite pictures of planets.

So I end up creating a new procedural: “Planet” texture, that has all the needed features and more, it provides enough detail at every scale and more important, is not very similar at different scales so zooming in will give you an entirely different view with new details and features in the terrain, it also have iso-lines and features that simulate erosion, rivers, platforms, and more , all using a single procedural!!!

It also has a very interesting feature: at small scales it has a curl-like behaviour, and adding more octaves will add more small curls,
unlike the current Magic texture that only add detail to the existent
loops, this will prove usefull for rocks, and texture driven flow for
particles.

As always a picture worth a thousand word, judge yourself, I think this
texture is worth integration 😉 .

Hope you like it

Cheers
Farsthary