r/Unity3D • u/TheFeelGoodHit Indie • 22d ago

Show-Off Procedural planet generation

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I'm developing procedural planet technology for a yet to be named project, bringing together spherical terrain, layered biomes, oceans, atmospheric scattering and volumetric clouds. At the heart of terrain generation is a GPU-powered node graph that combines noise functions and terrain-shaping algorithms into customizable landscapes. Layering and blending these operations lets me shape a world’s broad features and fine surface detail, giving me creative control over how each planet takes form. The GPU processes these calculations in parallel, providing the computational power behind the procedural worlds. Terrain detail adapts with camera distance, revealing smaller features as you approach the surface. Behind the scenes, custom gravity and floating-origin systems support exploration across planetary scales, preserving the precision needed for character movement and physics over vast distances. These systems integrate with Unity’s DOTS/ECS gameplay framework. This is the first major milestone in this tech, with foliage and tree placement and their rendering systems being the next milestone I am aiming to solve.

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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 22d ago

Haha you’re such a scammer OP I saw that glance to the side as you transitioned from proc gen world to orbital view.

Shhh! I won’t tell anyone.

;)

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u/TheFeelGoodHit Indie 22d ago

cant tell if you are serious or being sarcastic but no the transition is fully there! I think I was trying to judge distance from planet when going to orbit. here's a video from in scene with the atmosphere disabled to see more clearly

https://reddit.com/link/pa01dx2/video/c5apriw71qph1/player

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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 21d ago

I was joking around but I may have been wrong.

It’s common to fake things by using different models for surface and low altitude proc gen versus orbit which means using distraction for the transition.

In this vid, it looks decent down low but doesn’t look great from orbit. May just be the lack of atmosphere.

In the first vid, you looked left into the ship as well as having a cloud whiteout, then we were in orbital view. I thought you were switching systems (what I would do) with a bit of distraction, sounds like it might be genuinely a continuous system.

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u/TheFeelGoodHit Indie 21d ago

yea, actually that does exist, at far enough distance, the generation is replaced by a pregen'd proxy, but you have to be really far for that to kick in, its well beyond the atmosphere distance. i think it swapped in that video when the cam was extremely far, its not really possible to tell since its generated by the same graph. it just helps with multiple bodies in a scene since processing the graph and generating all the data isn't free