Any idea when support for 2018 might be coming now that Substance Designer has added their plugin?
Hi, Iāve been laying low with 2018 while waiting and now that the beta is released of the new plugin I will begin to implement a 2018 branch. I see some comments in the forum that itās still unstable and a bit problematic ( https://discussions.unity.com/t/686071 page-4) so I expect to run in to some issues. Over all, I still think it is positive that itāll be an Allegorithmic plugin since it should ultimately allow higher quality planets =)
Awesome. Looking forward to it!
Great asset indeed. What I would like to see is the possibility for one procedural planet, cast shadow on another one.
Im currrently working on procedural planetary terrain, can this modified to export heightmaps in runtime that i can use for terrain generation?
Hey everyone, just a little update.
I have just returned from Unite Berlin. Exciting to see whatās in store for the 2018.x and 2019.x cycle - some features should really benefit this asset as well as my other assets.
I spoke to both a graphic/shader expert from Unity as well as a guy from Allegorithmic. I am personally a bit frustrated that Procedural Materials was deprecated in the 2018.x cycle because the Allegorithmic substance plugin is still in beta and itās missing some API-features that I rely on for the planets to work. I the long term I think we will greatly benefit from the fact itās a separate plugin since GPU support is coming and 4K textures are already enabled for the separate plugin.
So the status on the 2018-update is that I still canāt release it and I am very dependent on the substance plugin to mature. I will still investigate if I can modify my approach to remove the dependencies on the lacking API-features.
I have also got it to work quite reliably on my MacBook now in Unity 2017:
- Ensure you run the Metal graphics API (in Player Settings, un-tick Automatic Graphics API for Mac and set Metal to be the top one)
- Restart Unity (if you donāt see any planets, switch between deferred forward rendering in the Player settings) and restart Unity again - it should work in both but it seems to be a bit buggy when you switch between the two.
If you still have problems - give me a shout!
The composition map is the one that resembles a height map the most, it is what dictates where water level is set for example. You could probably use that as a base to generate your terrain texture from. Since the shader corssfades between poles and the equator of the planet you could probably not get a seamless transition to your terrain since your terrain probably wonāt know where to modify the mesh in relation to where the texture and sphere is.
I should be able to implement that. Spherical shadows seems to be easier to implement compared to the ring shadows that have really been problematic for me =) Thanks for the input!
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@imphenzia - Love your Plugin! My sons and I have been playing with it and a couple of things we havenāt figured out yet and we may have missed it from your video tutorials.
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Adding Rings: Couldnāt find an easy way to do this. We created an empty Game Object and attached the Ring Script to it off the New Procedural Planet. Once we did that and ran it the first time, the rings were created. Not sure this was what we were supposed to do
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Movement: In your videos you have a couple of different movements, one where the camera is at a distance and the planet rotates and the 2nd up close view of the planet. We looked through the demo scenes and we couldnāt find how we needed to do this and wasnāt sure if you created something custom, a setting we are missing, or another asset.
Thanks again for this great plugin, we are having allot of fun right now!
Hi - thanks, glad you like it! I am making this assets with my children as inspiration too so itās exciting to hear you are playing around with this with your sons.
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You should be able to add the Ring component to an existing planet - what happens if you click āAdd Componentā in the inspector and add the Ring component? I think Iāll implement a new button in the inspector that says āAdd Ringsā to make it easier.
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The camera was just different manually placed positions to showcase the planets from different angles. I think I ran a simple script on a planet too to rotate it around its own axis over time.
Time for another update. I think I have found a way to make it work in Unity 2018.x with the new Allegorithmic plugin and it should also remove some of the bugs that some of you have experienced on some platforms where the texture ends up just rendering white.
As Iām updating the asset Iām adding Level of Detail (LOD) feature to both the mesh and the textures as you can see in this quick devlog video:
Iām hoping to get this update out next week and Iām working on it every hours that I can when my kids are sleeping and Iām when Iām not at work =)
I think the video will go through most things about the LOD feature rather than me listing it in text as well but give me a shout if you have any questions or thoughts about it.
Iāve got the Gas Giants up and running now - hereās a quick preview:
Hoping to release 1.0 of this asset this week or next!
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Looks great and the planets are very distinct and variable. Good work!
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I just watched the vid and the screenshots.
Dude, that is some sick work you have there!
Very cool! 
Itās good to see, there are people out there, dabbling in planets
and doing some amazing work!
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Hey again - thanks for the kind comments guys!
Gas planets are more or less fully implemented now - here are some examples.
The gas planets also have irregular storms that can be customized, similar to Jupiter:
And Iāve implemented built in scripting animation:
Iām have also added the ability to ābakeā procedural planets to static prefabs. Baked planets will load instantly and work on all platforms but the drawback is that they canāt be customized further (except for some shader-based features) and they also take up disk space. The textures are exported as PNG files and a material is created with the correct settings for the planet shader. The settings JSON file is also included which can be imported again to recreate the procedural planet. Check it out:
Iāve also added very detailed XML-documentation - especially useful for scripting:
https://www.imphenzia.com/documentation/procedural-planets/class_procedural_planets_1_1_planet_manager.html
The 1.0 release of the asset is getting very close now. I am going on holiday with my family for a week but I will bring my laptop and hopefully release the asset while on holiday =)
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This is awesome. Real AAA quality. Your gas giants look better than the ones of Mass Effect. It took a little while but you delivered ;).
Opinion: Enjoy the time with you family. It does not come back. I guess noone is hurt when you release a few days later.
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Thanks! Yes - I make sure to prioritize time with them, but I tend to stay up later so I can still fit some hours in. Itās like therapy for me to do this stuff since its one of my hobbies that I really enjoy =)
Hey I shot you an email. For some reason I canāt download the latest release. Iāve tried deleting the package and re-downloading, updating via Unity asset store, etc and no luck. For some reason it keeps downloading the alpha version. It may have to do with the fact that Unity crashed the first time I tried to update.
Hi, Iāve had similar reports on my YouTube channel and via mail. Not sure whatās going on yet. I have just contacted the asset store support to see if they can see any problems.
While Iām waiting for the Asset Store support to come back, here is the video trailer for version 1.0:
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Sweet keep us posted. Project is currently busted until I can get that imported 
Any word? Still canāt update, a good chunk of my scripts access the planet generator scripts so my project is current completely RIP until I can get it updated properly