ProcPlanets

A small tool to generate 3D planets, using native WebGPU. The goal of this tool is mainly to train myself on WebGPU, various graphics programming techniques, and procedural generation.

Showcase here

Build

• clone the glfw, glfw3webgpu, glm git submodules to the external folder
• clone the imgui repo and add to it the CMakeLists.txt found here: https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/basic-3d-rendering/some-interaction/simple-gui.html#setting-up-imgui

Features

• Procedural shape and normal generation with noise
• Post-process ocean on a ray-traced sphere
• Triplanar texture mapping
• Shadow map
• Skybox from https://tools.wwwtyro.net/space-3d/index.html

TODOs and Ideas

More important is on top (or not)

• add some textures ?
  • would be nice to have a drag and drop to test a texture
• atmosphere
• ocean shader
  • the transparency of the ocean when there's no light is ugly
  • actual waves
• add a slow rotation of the planet: can give a better idea of the of the looks of the shadows
• shadows:
  • how to make the shadows less "blocky" ? is there other methods to do the shadows ?
  • view frustrum of the shadow rendering should change depending on the planet radius (breaks if planet too big)
  • could add percentage-closer filtering
• improve the terrain edition for more "earth-like" aspect
  • more variety of shapes: plateau, crests...
  • less regular "wavyness" with a lot of flat parts but also some high and some deep parts ?
• add props on the surface
  • trees, rocks, grass/vegetation
• compute the geometry on a compute shader ?
• add LOD
• add flight simulator
  • spawn from camera
  • simple collision with the mesh ?
• add a bike/car drive on the surface ?
• Improve GUI
  • Show a timer of the time taken to build the planet
  • show the current amount of polygons/vertices
• Get rid of the seams between faces ? (They are invisible on high res)
• Could improve the vertex normals computation (maybe not worth the hastle and computations)