Hi everyone,
For the past 8 months I have been working on an addon for outdoor environments. It focuses on terrain, clouds, atmosphere, instancing and water for large (planetary) environments.
I’ve always thought existing terrain tools kind of suck because they operate on small tiles that you have to carefully place in your shot. Instead, PlanetSet’s terrain system generates a full-scale section of planetary surface.
I’ve implemented method that is very similar to adaptive subdivision, meaning you can get close details like rocks all the way to huge distant mountains with a reasonable amount of memory. This doesn’t rely on Cycles Experimental - it’s all in geo nodes.
For example, in this picture the rocks on the floor are real 3D displacement, as well as the mountains in the distance. Everything is also clipped to the camera frustum to reduce the memory usage.
You can use geo nodes to create any sort of displacement you like, and the dicing algorithm will take care of the subdivision. I think this is a really powerful way to create terrains and I’m really interested to see what artists can do with it!
PlanetSet also features a spherical atmosphere system, so you get the effects of haze, god rays, sun glow and more. You can also place realistic cloud layers, which are highly customisable and can be scaled to span all the way over the horizon. There are lots of other features which you can see on the BlenderMarket page.
For more info, see the BlenderMarket page.
If you are interested in how it works, see the docs.
There’s also a Discord server where you can ask questions and give feedback.
A large amount of my time has gone into developing this and the base technical features are complete. My aim is to continue to refine the technical side of things and also add more preset content, and so it is currently released as a beta. If you’re interested, it will be on another beta sale through September where you can get the full addon for 25% off!
I’d love to hear everyone’s opinions on this, happy Blending!