[Bf-committers] New procedural texture: Planet

[raulf at info.upr.edu.cu]

Hi all :)

 This weekend I need to create a procedural planet for a local work, so I
went straigth to tinkering with built in procedural textures, sadly there
where no simple combination of procedurals that provide me satellite like
view of planet surfaces, in order to achieve that a procedural should
have some desired properties:

  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 is 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 currently happen with Cloud porcedural)

  It should provide detail enough at all scales in order to avoid
increasing the number of noise octaves beyond wthat's currently blender
have built in, for planet surfaces extremely close shorts should be made
to the surface or build very big spheres, and from far away any
smoothness
will be inmediately spotted.

  The usual approach is to use lots of layers and composited procedurals
in order to achive that, with the corresponding slow down, and trial and
error approach or use some of the excelent directly aviable satellite
pictures of planets (not an option for people offline like me).

 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 have a very interesting feature: at small scales it have 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.

  I have send my post to Lapinou to be uploaded in my site soon.

                                                       Cheers  Farsthary