Geekily enough I have to say adding 3D Perlin Noise to the planet was a lot of fun - it really wasn't a lot of work to move the 2D Perlin Noise code to 3D and I quickly got some visual results. It's frustrating sometimes working with graphics to toil away and have no big change to show for it. The same goes for any programming really, fixing some memory problem can often be a lot more work than creating something visual but the visual change is an obvious and immediate reward. Here's my first application of 3D noise to the procedural sphere:
Not bad eh? It turns out a lot of geography/astronomy books have totally the wrong idea on how planets look, and it took a lot of origami to make the books mimic what my code produced. Then I thought of having to do all those folds to all those already published books to conform to my model, and I caved to making my model a little more like what the books say. Here are a few different levels of detail for the planetoid - you can see that the noise is always coherent at different levels of detail and doesn't change too much from the previous/next levels.
Here are a few attempts at a less-asteroidy-more-planety model. The main changes were increasing the frequency parameter of the Perlin Noise and decreasing the height change that the noise would realise. The last one looks most realistic, but on a proper planet, you could barely see the mountains at a distance because the height-scale is so negligent compared to the scale of the planet.
Here's a higher level of detail on the surface of the last planet, next I'll need to texture that landscape...
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