Hi John,

I really haven't tried very hard to make cratered planets. Earthlike does have a cratering option (-c I think) but it's not very good as I haven't put much work into it. Here's a picture of a normal map that's cratered (I am not totally sure the normal maps that earthlike produces are actually correct -- my graphics engine for space nerds in space can't actually use the normal maps. I should really fix that some day.)


cratered-normal-map.png

Heightmap from earthlike should be easy, as internally it uses a cubemap of 6 square arrays of 3d vectors the magnitudes of which are --- wait for it -- heights. Just scale those magnitudes to whatever range you like and spit out grayscale pngs. I may give this a shot myself as it seems like it might be interesting.

Incidentally there are probably some easy optimizations that could speed it up greatly as it iterates over every single one of those vectors for every bump added, iirc, and it should be possible to avoid the majority of that work by figuring out for example, that an entire row of vectors is nowhere near a given bump and can thus be skipped instead of dumbly plodding through all of them whether they're needed or not.