Procedurally generated worlds need procedurally generated surfaces. Painting each texture by hand doesn't scale — so I built this generator alongside my own game world to rapidly produce unique planet textures in seconds. It is now being developed into a standalone application.
Three modules in one tool: slider-driven planet generation with GPU compute erosion, node-based starmap compositing with an HDR pipeline, and biome-aware cloud systems. Engine-ready PBR textures for sci-fi worlds in seconds.
Generate unique planet textures from sliders with real-time preview (GPU compute erosion at 4K in 0.3 s) · compose cinematic space backgrounds from a node graph with HDR pipeline and cubemap export · export production-ready PBR texture sets (basecolor, heightmap, normal map, roughness, packed) · 16+ presets covering desert worlds, temperate planets, ice worlds, barren moons and 5 starmap themes · dual workflow: slider-driven planets for fast iteration, node graphs for starmap compositing.
The generator produces the celestial textures your scenes need, ready to drop onto a sphere or into a shader. No hand-painting, no node spaghetti.
Terran, rocky, lava, ice and alien worlds with realistic terrain and PBR surface detail.
Banded, swirling atmospheres with depth and motion-ready cloud structure.
Stars and emissive bodies for lighting, skyboxes and background composition.
Biome-aware cloud layers to wrap your planets in atmosphere.
A clean slider-driven workflow with a real-time 3D preview. Tune it, watch it update, export it.
Shape continents, mountains and detail with simple parameters. No node graph to untangle, just dial it in.
Hydraulic erosion on the GPU carves realistic gullies, ridges and valleys into the terrain in real time.
An OpenGL viewport with real relief lighting and atmosphere, so you see the finished body while you tune it.
Two generation modes for different tasks. Planets use a sequential slider pipeline for fast iteration. Starmaps use a node graph for creative compositing. Both produce production-ready output.
Perlin noise, ridged multifractal, Voronoi tessellation, tectonic plates with continental drift simulation, crater fields and surface detail layers.
Domain warping for organic shapes, gaussian smoothing, terrace stepping, curves adjustment, normalize, clamp, invert. All with real-time parameter sliders.
Pipe-model hydraulic erosion on OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders. Latitude correction for equirectangular projection. 4K erosion in 0.3 s on an RTX 5080, plus thermal erosion with cliff preservation.
Height- and slope-based masks for selective blending. Altitude thresholds control where snow, sand or vegetation appears.
Gradient-based colorization by altitude, slope-aware shading, hillshade lighting, ocean coloring with depth falloff and polar ice caps.
Exports basecolor, heightmap, normal map (four-scale UDN blending) and roughness. Packed texture export for engine-ready channel packing.
Node-based compositing for cinematic space backgrounds. An HDR pipeline with ACES tonemapping produces spatial envelope nebulae that look like real astrophotography, not procedural noise.
Full float64 processing with ACES tonemapping. Colors stay rich and natural through the entire compositing chain without clipping or banding.
Teal, Blue, Amber, Violet, Emerald. Each preset produces a distinct mood. Desaturated, subtle, Star-Citizen-style backgrounds.
DDS cubemap output in horizontal cross layout. Imports directly into Unreal Engine 5 as a TextureCube for skybox use.
Recursive noise for nebula shapes, domain warping for organic structures, star field layers with brightness in alpha. Full creative control.
The built-in 3D viewport renders the planet with vertex displacement, PBR material properties and atmospheric glow. OpenGL 4.3 with compute shaders for GPU erosion. Immediate visual feedback while adjusting sliders.
Heightmap data drives actual geometry displacement on the sphere, not just a flat texture. Mountains and valleys are visible in silhouette.
Four-scale normal blending (macro, meso, fine, micro) using UDN technique with 2x shader amplification. Surface detail comes from lighting alone.
Fresnel-based atmosphere glow with auto-coloring derived from the planet's surface palette. Adjustable density and color override.
Orbit with left mouse, pan with middle mouse, zoom with scroll. Full interactive inspection of the generated planet from any angle.
Full PBR texture sets with engine presets that set orientation, packing, colorspace and bit depth for you. Cubemap and equirectangular output.
Basecolor, height, normal, roughness, metallic, AO, plus packed channel exports for engine-ready materials.
Seamless cubemap output for spheres and skyboxes, or equirectangular maps that wrap any planet mesh.
Export presets handle the per-engine quirks automatically, no manual flipping or repacking.
Every planet generates a full equirectangular projection that maps directly onto a sphere in any game engine. The 2D preview shows the unwrapped texture with terrain, ocean, erosion and polar ice visible.
DearPyGui for the full desktop application: node editor, properties panel, 3D viewport and toolbar. GPU-accelerated immediate-mode UI.
Custom spherical noise functions (fBm, ridged, Voronoi, domain warp) with Numba JIT compilation for near-native performance on large textures.
OpenGL 4.3 with custom GLSL shaders for PBR rendering and compute shaders for erosion. Vertex displacement, atmosphere glow and thread-safe GPU context management.
Custom DAG execution engine with topological sort, dirty flag propagation and type-safe pin connections. 34 node types across 7 categories.
Generators, combiners, filters, erosion, selectors, color and output nodes. Covers the full planet creation workflow.
Planet presets for every biome, 5 cinematic starmap themes, 16 cloud variants across 6 biome types.
Basecolor, heightmap, normal map, roughness and packed exports. All generated from a single graph, ready for import into any game engine.
Macro, meso, fine and micro normal layers blended with UDN technique. Surface detail comes from lighting, not color noise.
4K hydraulic erosion in 0.3 seconds. OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders with pipe-model simulation, latitude correction and thermal erosion. 500x faster than CPU.
Slider-driven planet generation, node-based starmap compositing, and biome-aware cloud systems. Each optimized for its task.
The Universe Generator is actively in development. Most core systems are complete. Current focus is preset tuning and UE5 integration.
| Phase | Status | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Node System | Complete | DAG engine, 34 nodes, graph execution, dirty caching |
| Slider Engine | Complete | Planet v2 pipeline, debounced auto-regeneration, preset loading |
| GPU Compute | Complete | OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders, hydraulic erosion, thread-safe context |
| PBR Export | Complete | Basecolor, height, normal, roughness, packed channel export |
| Cloud System | In Progress | 6 biome types, 16 presets, cyclone warp, GPU rendering |
| Save / Load | Complete | JSON graph serialization for starmaps, preset system for planets |
| Standalone Release | Planned | Packaged desktop app, documentation, community presets |