michaelega / simple-stochastic-planet-shader

Generates a planet texture from a heightmap (includes cloud shader)

Simple-Stochastic-Planet-Shader

A simple procedural planet shader with stochastic texturing

Get it here: https://github.com/michael-evan-allison/Simple-Stochastic-Planet-Shader

Tested In: Unity URP 2022.2.9f1

Version History

17/03/2023 - Initial commit

Planet Shader Features

• Generates texture from heightmap (great if your procedurally generate heightmaps with say Libnoise)
• Looks good from far away to midrange
• Eight different terrain colours
• Three different detail textures: ground, water, and lights
• Control scale of detail textures
• Control metalic and smoothness of textures
• Triplanar texturing (so that textures look right regardless of angle)
• Stochastic texturing (avoids texture repition)
• Shadow attenuation (so the dark side of the planet is black)
• Control whether lights appear on the dayside or just on the darkside of the planet
• Control spread of lights
• Animate and control speed of water texture
• Control strength of heightmap and normals

Cloud Shader Features

• Input detail cloud texture for detail
• Control scale of cloud detail texture
• Control alpha threshold of cloud detail texture
• Stochastic texturing (avoids tiling of cloud detail texture)
• Shadow attenuation (so that clouds on the dark side of the planet are black)
• Triplanar texturing (so that textures look right regardless of angle)
• Animate and control speed of clouds so they move across the planet, unform and reform
• Control metalic and smoothness of clouds

How To Use

• Drag the planet sphere into the scene
• Drag in your selected heightmap (the higher the resolution the better it looks)
• Fiddle around with the heightmap strength until it looks right
• Add in your ground and water and light textures (or just use the samples provided)
• If your making a desert planet or similar use the ground texture in the water slot and make sure that the water speed is set to 0 so that the ground doesn't appear to move
• Set the colours for the different heights of the heightmap
• Set what height you'd like lights to appear from... something above 0.55 is good if you dont want them to appear in the water
• 'Lights Visibility' controls the degree to which lights appear on the dayside of the planet

Credits

• I implemented the custom lighting node by Cyanilus (MIT License), which can be found here: https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_ShaderGraphCustomLighting
• I implemented some of bgolus ideas for generating my own normal maps
• I implemented Junior_Djjr stochastic node, which can be found here: https://github.com/JuniorDjjr/UnityProceduralStochasticTexturingNode
• The cloud texture is from Solar System Scope (CC 4.0): https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
• Other Textures in example files from nasa earth observatory (Public Domain)

All content is licensed under Apache 2.0 unless otherwise stated