AstroGen – Procedural Generation of Highly Detailed Asteroid Models

We present a novel algorithm, called AstroGen, to procedurally generate highly detailed and realistic 3D meshes of small celestial bodies automatically. AstroGen gains it's realism from learning surface details from real world asteroid data. We use a sphere packing-based metaball approach to represent the rough shape and a set of noise functions for the surface details. The main idea is to apply an optimization algorithm to adopt these representations to available highly detailed asteroid models with respect to a similarity measure. Our results show that our approach is able to generate a wide variety of different celestial bodies with very complex surface structures like caves and craters.

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