Welcome to PlanetSet

PlanetSet is an addon for Blender that enables the creation of massive and detailed environments. It is the only terrain system for Blender that provides the technical foundations for planet-scale landscapes, atmosphere and clouds.

If you encounter any bugs or issues please get in contact via BlenderMarket or in the PlanetSet Discord.

For installation instructions, see getting started.

News

2024.1 (Beta) - 03/02/2024

Changes:

• New: Major improvements to the terrain dicing system:
  • Geometry nodes repeat zones are now leveraged, allowing for much smaller surface details
  • Significant speed and performance improvements through new geometry caching method
  • Smooth subdivision surface now used (smooth interpolation of base geometry), with minimal performance impact
  • Add custom base terrain geometry (e.g. use metablobs to create cliffs and overhangs)
• New: Add custom base geometry to the terrain using an Aux Geometry collection. This allows the creation of highly detailed displaced cliffs, rocks & overhangs.
• New: Control the time of day using latitude, longitude, date and time. All major worldwide timezones supported! Find out more here.
• New: Terrain mapping node for the shader editor (align height maps with color maps). See more here.
• New: Maximum scattering bounces control for the atmosphere shader.
• New: Aerosol absorption tint and scatter strength parameters.
• New: Gobo 2D cloud layer for fast cloud shadows.
• Improved: Improved aerosol model for the atmosphere shader.
• Changed: The terrain displacement nodes are blank by default now and the preset terrain nodes are stored in a separate .blend files to reduce clutter

2023.2 (Beta) - 24/06/2023

Changes:

• New: Improved Mie lobe volume shader on all cloud layers.
• New: Seed parameter on the Plant Instancer for quickly iterating through new distributions.
• New: Option in atmosphere settings to disable the Nishita sky texture and use a custom one.
• Improved: Water shader improvements:
  • Water shader transmission easier for Cycles to integrate.
  • Sediment absorption levels added to water shader.
  • Better water edge foam shading with new sparsity parameter.
• Fix: Plant instancer not correctly instancing selected collection.
• Changed: Renamed Radial Heightfield to Image Heightmap.
• Changed: Color management settings are no longer adjusted by the 'Adjust Cycles Settings' Operator. Film exposure is now adjusted to 0.1 to account for day brightness. This can be turned off in the addon preferences.

2023.1 (Beta) - 14/05/2023

Major Licensing Changes:

PlanetSet is now Free to Learn for non-commercial use!

PlanetSet on BlenderMarket.

PlanetSet's userbase did not grow as expected since its launch, and the lack of feedback has made development challenging. Having a steep learning curve, particularly with geometry nodes, the limited number of users hindered knowledge sharing among artists. The current objective is to remove this obstacle by making the software free to learn for non-commercial purposes, allowing more artists to try it out and potentially purchase a commercial license in the future.

Thank you to everyone who has purchased the hobbyist version of PlanetSet. Your support has been crucial in the significant improvements made to the addon since its initial release. Paid users will still receive priority help, early updates and potentially exclusive features in future releases.

If you find PlanetSet useful and you'd like to support its development, please consider purchasing a paid copy :).

Changes:

• New: Warp cloud shader (faster & improved pattern, replaces Billow Clouds).
• New: Alto-warp clouds (Warp clouds with breakup and waves).
• New: Clouds now have a seed parameter for quickly iterating through looks.
• New: Shear displacement node.
• Improved: Default render dicing rate changed to 3.
• Improved: Numerous improvements to the addon code.
• Changed: Generic Clouds renamed to Simple Clouds.
• Fix: Union node.
• Fix: Subterrace node default parameters changes to working combination.

2022.5 (Beta) - 20/01/2023

A little overdue, this update contains major improvements to the addon as well as some new features and content.

• New: Overhauled water system: water is now created and controlled through the water bodies panel.
• New: New realistic water shader with volumetric coloring, ripples, foam and more.
• New: Oceans are now displaceable micro-polygon surfaces like terrain.
• New: Can convert your own objects to water bodies. Read more here.
• New: The dice rate setting is now in units of facets per pixel so that the subdivision can be precisely controlled. Read more here.
• New: There are now two dicing rate settings for the viewport and render modes. This allows the rendering of higher dicing rates in Cycles without affecting the viewport.
• New: Terrain nodes shortcut button in the geometry nodes panel.
• New: Option to center cloud domains over the 3D cursor when adding a new cloud layer.
• New: Option to automatically switch to Cycles with optimal settings when PlanetSet is enabled. See here.
• New: Reassign camera operator (found in search menu).
• Improved: Generic cloud shader density is now modulated with height.
• Improved: Improved scattering phase function in cloud shaders for more realistic cloud tones.
• Improved: Atmospheric density values are in terms of a factor (default equal to 1) rather than the actual volume density measure.
• Improved: You can now add cloud layers without enabling the atmosphere incase you would like to use alternative sky lighting.
• Improved: Cloud domains are now represented by cylindrical bounds instead of wireframes.
• Improved: General improvements to the underlying addon system.
• Fix: Physical sky not switching back to Nishita sky after saving .blend file.
• Fix: No UI handle for no active camera in scene.
• Docs: New minimalist theme to the documentation website.
• Docs: Improvements/amendments to existing documentation.

2022.4 (Beta) - 12/09/2022

• New: Freeze option in the planet settings that stops the terrain from updating whilst enabled. Useful for moving/animating the active camera.
• New: Physical atmosphere option available (limited to 1/5th scale).
• New: Ridged mountains procedural node.
• New: Procedural stones node.
• New: Cliff rocks effect node.
• New: Strata effect node.
• New: Normal and vector displacement node groups.
• New: Custom UI icon.
• Improved: Significantly increased efficiency of terrain dicing in response to high camera altitudes.
• Improved: Atmosphere shader now accounts for ozone layer absorption (more accurate dawn/dusk).
• Improved: Removed the vector input from mask nodes as they are misleading.
• Improved: Improved default scene.
• Fix: Atmosphere not updating correctly with camera altitude.
• Fix: Rectangular mask falloff.
• Docs: Numerous improvements and additions to the docs.

2022.3 (Beta) - 23/08/2022

2022.3 features a complete overhaul of the planetary terrain implementation, allowing for micropolygon displacement which drastically increases the achievable detail of terrains. Note this is not dependant the Cycles experimental feature and works in the raster viewport preview. See getting started for a brief overview of the updated workflow.

• New: Novel dicing method which provides almost perfect per-pixel dicing for more accurate details in terrain and micropolygon displacement without Cycles Experimental.
• New: Terrain displacement is now carried out completely in geometry nodes with no modifier stacks, enabling greater control for artists (existing presets have been converted to node groups).
• New: Terrain clip option, which when enabled will discard terrain geometry outside of the camera frustum. For high detail renders this can save a significant amount of memory.
• New: More efficient and precise rectangular camera frustum clipping implementation with padding options.
• New: Vector displacement (along geometry normals etc) is now properly supported and works with micropolygon dicing.
• New: New options when adding a Plant Instancer to center to the 3D cursor and automatically create a collection from the selection.
• New: Mask shape nodes that can be used to manipulate terrain.
• New: The terrain presets are no longer located in the planet panel, but are instead available inside the node group.
• New: The default planet surface has a preset applied.
• Improvement: Altitude bias now adds onto the camera altitude automatically.
• Improvement: Some UI improvements and optimisations.
• Improvement: Default Generic Cloud edge darkness and sharpness values made much lower.
• Improvement: Default Plant Instancer min height set to -1m to avoid confusion.

2022.2 (Beta) - 03/08/2022

• New: Sun elevation and rotation shortcut in atmosphere settings.
• New: Proximity Leveller terrain modifier.
• New: Overhauled the Billow Clouds shader, 'Cloud Fractal 2', which is faster and provides more consistent details and roughness control.
• New: Exposure and gamma in color management settings are automatically changed when using the Adjust Cycles Settings operator (can be switched off in addon preferences).
• New: Auto Leaf convenience operator to automatically set up leaf materials (alpha and translucency) if they are not already.
• Improvement: Terrain tessellation responds better to changes in FOV and altitude bias.
• Improvement: Mist density is now modulated by fractal noise for increased realism. See mist.
• Improvement: Improved water realism by changing roughness variation modulator to a power fractal.
• Improvement: Atmosphere and sky default values changed to improve realism.
• Improvement: Adding a user displacement terrain modifier now copies the node group template.
• Improvement: Docs button moved in addon preferences.
• Fix: Power Clouds coverage issue fixed.
• Docs: Docs now have permalinks on headers.