Last modified: December 4th, 2024
While I’ve been working on Aerill, my own fantasy extraterrestrial planet, I’ve come across a number of awesome, free, web-based tools to help realistically generate or view your planet’s surface.
Donjon Fractal World Generator & Fantasy World Generator
Updated: The Fractal World Generator no longer provides a physics description and name as this screenshot shows. Fractal World generator just creates a randomized equirectangular world map, whereas if you want any lore/location inspiration, use the Fantasy World Generator, which creates a map AND labeled locations.
Tyro Procedural Planet Generator
My personal favorite surface map generator, because it provides your map in color, bump map, opacity map, and relief views. It can take a good amount of time and resources to load, especially at higher resolutions.
Harder to use, requires more fiddling with the settings under Surface > Noise to get the look you desire; I played trial-and-error with the Noise settings for quite a long time. Click “Randomize Seed” or “Randomize All” to generate a new map. When you find one that you like, raise the resolution up to 2048 or higher and save the generated map images.
This tool was used to create my fantastic world Aerill’s surface map!
PlanetMaker
http://planetmaker.wthr.us – DOWN, archived from December 2020
This tool is a very detailed outer space scene creator, but it does not let you generate a new surface map. It has photo-realistic surface maps of real planets built-in, but you cannot really fiddle with the appearance of them, so you will want to bring your own pre-made map. Instead, it lets you play with more of the astronomical elements and view your world in beautiful, realistic high-definition. You can import your own surface map, specular map, height map, and bump map for a stunning look at your world. This tool also lets you play with sunlight angles, including sunlight at a particular Earth day and time, so you can figure out which parts of your world will be in each time zone, and create as many moons as you want.
Globe 3D
Ever since MaptoGlobe went down, I’ve been looking for a good way to take an equirectangular map and slap it on a 3D globe – here’s the next best solution! Upload your equirectangular world map and you can immediately get a simulated globe, which can be used to take pictures of polar areas without distortion.
Normal Map Online
This amazing, startlingly-fast online tool lets you create a normal/specular map from a black-and-white height map, which can then be used to give dimension to the 3D surface of your planet. It also contains tons of useful information about how normal maps work and how to make your own. Useful for creating a height map for your world!
MapGen4
This is another map generator, but this one focuses on realistic river generation, which is enormously helpful for creating plausible landmasses. Mapgen4 lets you generate as well as “paint” areas of land, and then adjust sliders determining rainfall, evaporation, even the rain shadow to help you visualize which areas would be lush versus barren.
FlagWaver
A neat little tool that allows you to upload an image of a flag, which is then placed in a simulated scene with controllable wind and orientation. It’s a minor piece of worldbuilding, but there’s something tremendously satisfying about seeing your fantasy nation’s flags waving in the wind as if they’re real.
Phonetic Alphabet Writer & Reader
Writer – https://tophonetics.com/
Reader – http://ipa-reader.xyz/
Two tools that I use in parallel – one lets you write words and generate an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) pronunciation. I will write out real English words that sound similar to the fantasy word I’m imagining.
For example, if the fantasy word I’m imagining is “jakshin”. So I’ll write the English name “Jack” into the writer, which gets written as the IPA ʤæk. Now I’ll write the English word “shin”, which gets written as the IPA ʃɪn. Now I’ll combine them together to make ʤækʃɪn and paste that into the IPA reader to make sure it gets pronounced the way I desire. If it doesn’t, I need to find other IPA letters by trying out other words in the writer. Trial and error!
Karl
Sorry for necroposting, but I’ve seen from this post and your fantasy map post that you have success in making continents in the procedural planet generator. My question is how did you accomplish that? I have yet to be able to do it myself. Any help would be appreciated.
Lukas
Try reloading the page until you get a randomly generated world WITH continents already, and then try “Randomize Seed” to redo the world generation with those same settings. I agree that it’s confusing and complicated to use, I honestly never properly “learned” it, I just randomized until I liked what I got.
yo boy Tyrone
yo yo y’all making some good stuff now this is fire
Paul
I love space!
diya
this is very COOL
Tu Lieu
I want to create planets
Natalie
I’m so glad too!!!!!!
Mark
This was very helpful. Thank you for putting this together.
Lukas
I’m so glad!!