Procedural Generated Planet With LOD

“Computer Graphics and Interaction” at KTH

Procedural generation and level of detail (LOD) systems are highly researched and sought-after topics within the graphics and gaming industries. This project implements and studies the procedural generation of a planet with a LOD system. The procedurally generated planet was implemented in the Unity 3D Game engine using a 3D Simplex noise on a sphere for terrain generation. The noise generated different heights for the planet. The noise values ranged from -1 to 1, with negative values treated as 0, creating the ocean on the planet. To give the planet an earth-like appearance, a shader was applied to different heights of the planet, resulting in a blue ocean with various depth levels, yellow shores, green land, and brown mountains with white tops. A LOD algorithm was additionally implemented for the planet using QuadTree which made it capable of rendering very detailed terrain when the camera is close to the surface of the planet.

This project consisted of a successful three-person teamwork, where every member was part of every aspect of the development process, through a pair programming approach. We created a blog about our journey which is available online, as well as a live version of the project.

Other team members: Adam Cerven and Kári Steinn Aðalsteinsson.