Description
NOTE Originally this is developed for Blender 3.0, If Blender 3.1 or higher gives any errors with changing seeds, just ungroup the grouped node on the right inside the shader.
This is not a plugin, it is a .Blend save file with a terrain shader, lighting, camera setup and atmosphere in it
Short description
This is a procedural planet with 3D nature and cities for Blender Cycles.
The planet is slightly larger than earth.
The terrain is made with procedural noise and the 3D structures and trees are generated by saved displacement images. This doesn’t need any mods or plugins to use.
With this project, its possible to make a seamless animation from space to surface.
This download contains a procedural planet with atmosphere and volumetric clouds. everything is textured and features city lights for night time renders. This model can be used for commercial purposes and is originally developed for Blender Cycles only.
The large scale procedural terrain generator is also included in the folder.
This is a just a chunk of 750km with atmosphere for surface and high altitude renders.
Instructional video
There is a text file included with a link to a short instructional YouTube videos to give some guidance to using this project.
Closeup water
Due to the scale and complexity of the setup, there can be some errors visible in the water when near it. There is a ‘’closeup water’’ object that might need slight size or height adjustment right above the original water to block these errors.
Seed Parameters
In the shader of the terrain there is a set of parameters where you can generate a seed of your liking
There is a general seed parameter that randomizes everything every time you change it.
There is also more parameters for more precise tweaking like: Mountain, desert and city location seeds.
There is also parameters to increase or decrease biomes. For example you can have a 100% snow or desert map, or 100% skyscrapers.
Camera setup
There is a second wide angle camera behind the main camera that’s responsible for the adaptive displacement. This camera will give priority to closer details compared to far details (for optimization reasons)
Performance (Cycles)
The scene is optimized to get as much details with as little memory usage as possible. I would still recommend a system with at least 8gb RAM (and 6gb GPU memory if you decide to render on your GPU).
If your GPU doesn’t have enough memory, you can always choose to render on your CPU.
I have included some example settings and how much memory usage there is in the images above.
All renders on this page are rendered with 32gb of ram.
There are 2 different planet files included, One is a single object sphere, the other is a sphere separated in chunks, These chunks displacement modifiers can be turned on or off depending of visibility on the surface, This helps with keeping memory usage low.