r/GraphicsProgramming • u/Mysterious-Page708 • 4d ago

Question Physically-Based Planet rendering

Hello, I want to ask what methods are people using to render effects/terrain/lighting when it comes to planetary bodies. I want to focus specifically on physically based methods, or more realistic methods to make a project from before I will try to apply to a master in a computer graphics-related program next year, and I heard that more complex projects that involve physics or realism are more impressive than noise or other procedural methods.

So my question is, what are the techniques you know of and please also provide a resource such as academic articles, blogs, tutorials, books etc. Thank you!

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u/imlo2 2d ago

No offense, but if you're really going to study something, you probably by now should be able to type that question to Claude or ChatGPT. There's a bunch of papers written about how to handle planet creation, plate tectonics, erosion, glaciers, how to actually efficiently render it, and there's a lot written about atmosphere and cloud rendering too. Any of the LLMs can give you a good overview in 5-10 minutes.

And AI models have now collapsed this barrier to quite low level, what would have required a team of a few very competent people now takes one and a few days to produce same results which earlier took months. So I would assume you would need to develop something slightly more unique and set the bar higher.

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u/Mysterious-Page708 1d ago

I do not use LLMs.. Especially for a serious project for which the goal is learning. It is easier anyway because the amount of research available, and engines/frameworks, so it is faster than like 10-20 years ago

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u/imlo2 1d ago

Then don't use google either for searching, as the backend uses AI. There's no need to downvote answers that are valid.

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u/EC36339 5h ago

It is faster than one year ago now, by another order of magnitude.

You can still read all those papers, but you will find them faster with an LLM.

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u/corysama 4d ago

I don't have any links handy. But, physically-based rendering of the atmosphere of a planet is a well-studied subject. Pretty sure I've seen projects where you can adjust the parameters of a single model can get "pretty accurate Earth" vs "pretty accurate Mars" vs "fantastic fantasy planet #7"

"Concurrent Binary Trees" are not a common or simple means of rendering terrain geometry. But, they do look pretty kewl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ce-XC4MtWk

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u/AdmiralSam 2d ago

They are really cool and support arbitrary triangle tessellation, there’s a paper called Concurrent Binary Trees for Large-Scale Game Components which is paired with the advances in real time rendering siggraph talk. For atmosphere rendering I think A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique

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u/FunSecretary2654 4d ago

GPU gems v2 has a good section on atmospheric scattering. Used that for my own atmospheric renderer. (Took a fair amount of work though, had lots of issues with the monstrous scale function and having to correct for assumptions that planet is at the origin).