Large scale procedural planet with 3D cities and vegetation 3D model

NOTE Originally this is developed for Blender 3.0, If Blender 3.1 or higher gives any errors with changing seeds, just ungroup the grouped node on the right inside the shader. This is not a plugin, it is a .Blend save file with a terrain shader, lighting, camera setup and atmosphere in it

Short description

This is a procedural planet with 3D nature and cities for Blender Cycles. The planet is slightly larger than earth. The terrain is made with procedural noise and the 3D structures and trees are generated by saved displacement images. This doesn’t need any mods or plugins to use. With this project, its possible to make a seamless animation from space to surface. This download contains a procedural planet with atmosphere and volumetric clouds. everything is textured and features city lights for night time renders. This model can be used for commercial purposes and is originally developed for Blender Cycles only.

The large scale procedural terrain generator is also included in the folder. This is a just a chunk of 750km with atmosphere for surface and high altitude renders.

Instructional video

There is a text file included with a link to a short instructional YouTube videos to give some guidance to using this project.

Closeup water

Due to the scale and complexity of the setup, there can be some errors visible in the water when near it. There is a ‘’closeup water’’ object that might need slight size or height adjustment right above the original water to block these errors.

Seed Parameters

In the shader of the terrain there is a set of parameters where you can generate a seed of your liking There is a general seed parameter that randomizes everything every time you change it. There is also more parameters for more precise tweaking like: Mountain, desert and city location seeds.

There is also parameters to increase or decrease biomes. For example you can have a 100% snow or desert map, or 100% skyscrapers.

Camera setup

There is a second wide angle camera behind the main camera that’s responsible for the adaptive displacement. This camera will give priority to closer details compared to far details (for optimization reasons)

Performance (Cycles)

The scene is optimized to get as much details with as little memory usage as possible. I would still recommend a system with at least 8gb RAM (and 6gb GPU memory if you decide to render on your GPU). If your GPU doesn’t have enough memory, you can always choose to render on your CPU.

I have included some example settings and how much memory usage there is in the images above.

All renders on this page are rendered with 32gb of ram.

There are 2 different planet files included, One is a single object sphere, the other is a sphere separated in chunks, These chunks displacement modifiers can be turned on or off depending of visibility on the surface, This helps with keeping memory usage low.

Types of terrain:

• Continents

• Islands (any sizes: from 100 meters to country sized)

• Peninsulas

• Land bridges

• Mountains

• Rocky/collapsed mountainsides

• Rivers

• Rolling Hills

• Flat plains

• Canyons

• Cliffs

• Oceans

• Lakes/bays

Types of biomes: • Spruce forest

• Grassy fields in spruce forest

• Jungles

• Desert

• Snow

• Red desert and rocks

• (Light blue) oceans

• Beaches

• Farm fields/countryside

• Highways

• Cities (from mini villages to 200km metro areas)

o Suburbs (with single houses at the edge of cities)

o Commercial district

o Industrial district

o Historic city center

o Skyscraper downtown

o Supertall skyscraper with park

Features

• Large procedural planet setup (approx. 15000km diameter)

• Large scale procedural terrain setup (approx. 750km)

• Terrain chunks

• Procedural volumetric cloud layer which looks detailed from both space and surface.

• Higher detailed terrain than any high resolution texture based planet can provide.

• (adaptive) Displacement based

• No addons needed

• Detailed 3D cities and nature

• Detailed and diverse from low and high altitude renders

• Stylized map to easily find biomes and cities

• Atmosphere for scale effect

• Slight curvature for high altitude renders.

• Orange atmosphere for sunset (increase atmosphere density for more vibrant colors)

• Night sky with stars and milky way

• Night city lights

• Optimized memory usage

• Easy to customize seeds

• Possible to animate seeds

• Natural and complex looking terrain and biome blending.

• Possible to import custom objects (but keep in mind it’s a 1:1000 scale, so I advise only use large scale objects, like a space elevator or custom island)

• Advanced users can replace the cities and forests by their own diffuse and heightmaps.

• Advanced users can bake the setup for exports.

Other engines/software

This is developed for renders in Blender Cycles only. But with intermediate experience in Blender, it is possible to bake the diffuse and greyscale of this terrain shader for export purposes. The quality will be lower than the native terrain setup in Blender since images only have a certain amount of greyscale levels (256 for jpeg and png)

Use cases

(commercial/monetized) Examples for this scene can be used for: Game / Environment design ideas, concept art, 3D backgrounds, VR, AR, Research, high altitude renders, Greenscreen, Animation, advertisement, Education, presentations, city design study, landscape study, NFT, Film scene, HDRI

Feel free to edit and modify as much as you like.

Textures

Textures are custom made. But the grass color, rock and sand are CC0 textures from Polyhaven.