Procedural Voronoi Planets

Procedural algorithms are becoming more and more common in video games, since it’s a lot easier to create huge amounts of content by letting the computer generate it instead. Hence, that is how games like Minecraft are able to generate worlds bigger than our planet without getting repetitive. However, the algorithms are definitely not perfect at the moment, and there are many improvements on the way.

Procedural Voronoi Planets is not your typical game tool, but it can certainly come in handy if you plan on using randomized environments for your game. In short, this is a generator that allows you to create planets using Voronoi diagrams. The shapes in question are perfect for today’s voxel-based engines, although the tool at hand is still pretty basic.

The best part about it is that the developer provides you with the source code as well, which allows you to modify everything about the tool and get the results you want. This makes it a lot easier to implement into your own projects, as well as to add new components to it. On the other hand, the program is pretty barren right out of the box anyway, so it actually needs more components to begin with.

You can customize a few things about the planet you are about to generate, such as the amount of water it features, or the amount of ice there is on the surface. A couple of other sliders are included as well, all of which allow you to create all sorts of different planets. Granted, you shouldn’t expect vastly different results, but you can at least control some aspects of the algorithm.

On top of that, it is also possible to change the view mode and focus on the ocean, the humidity or the heat around the planet. Not only that, but you can also export the resulting model as an OBJ file, which can be used in any of the popular 3D modeling applications out there. This makes it a lot easier to generate assets for your CGI projects, although they are obviously quite basic models.

In the end, Procedural Voronoi Planets has a few strong points and a few weak ones, but it can certainly evolve into something much better in the future. Moreover, it’s great that you can use the source to integrate the generator into your own projects.