Procedural Generation of 3D Planetary-Scale Terrains

The creation of three-dimensional geographical surface has been a primary concern at the forefront of the fields of space mission simulation. This paper introduces how to apply procedural terrain generation techniques to the creation of 3D terrains for a spherical object. The paper first identifies algorithms that can be used to generate terrains on a spherical surface. Then, the paper compares computational complexity and scalability of using these algorithms in 3D planetary scale simulation. The paper uses a benchmarking program created in virtual reality (VR) to evaluate the performance of these algorithms in the simulation and imaging of planetary bodies in VR including execution time, quality and memory usage.