   Procedural Graphics Programing basics
  I'm currently a student at one of the schools delving in game programming and am near the end of my courses.I have long since been interested in procedural development; however, recently I decided that I think I would like to work on Procedural Game Programming in the industry.As such, I want to build a very basic planet generator as a portfolio project.My issues is, though, that I am having big troubles finding any kind of information on how to go about the process.  most all of my google searches only provide me with completed programs with now explanations.I'm hoping y'all can point me to a few sites that provides some excellent material.My big concern is how I would go about generating the height maps for the planets, as planets are generally round like, but rectangles do not fit on round surfaces.  How would I deal with smoothing at the edges, and so forth.My other issue is how to go about generating the polys.  I've read http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2074.asp and found it very enlightening, but I would like to see how other people may go about it.I hope y'all can be of assistance, as a lot of the articles on this site seem to have become very old and outdated.   
Quote:Original post by NcypheMy big concern is how I would go about generating the height maps for the planets, as planets are generally round like, but rectangles do not fit on round surfaces.  How would I deal with smoothing at the edges, and so forth.There is a (fairly technical) overview of the alternatives courtesy of vterrain.org. The favourite these days seems to be a cubemap, using this method to reduce distortion.Quote:My other issue is how to go about generating the polys.  I've read http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2074.asp and found it very enlightening, but I would like to see how other people may go about it.That was written back in the days when programmers worried about individual triangles - such has not been the case for some years. I would suggest a chunk based approach, where you start with a cubic mapping, and divide each face into square chunks of many triangles each. You can then treat each face as a quadtree if you need level-of-detail to display the planet at higher resolutions.If you are looking for a lot of information on procedural planets, make sure to read all of the blogs linked to from my procedural planets page - I think I have all the major players listed, and all tend to be very forthcoming with implementation details.   ;  Those were very helpful.  More than enough for me to get started with a very basic planet.I do have one question that has come to mind for when  want to take this further.Now, I think I understand what is going on, but I want to make sure.  The sphere gets cut up into pieces as the camera gets closer to the surface, but only near the camera.  Is all of this editing (I'll use D3DX for example) done inside of a mesh object, or does the planetary model simply keeps getting chunks of it re-rendered each time the camera either moves out of range of the area or gets closer.I guess, what I'm really trying to figure out is the best way to handle the manipulation of the 3D mesh for the purpose of planetary generation.   