Planet Painter

If low-poly design is something you're interested in, the thought that it'd lend itself well to creating and shaping planets has probably crossed your mind at least once. Terrain editors would do well in that case, but not many are focused on helping you create spherical planets, then modifying their surface.

Planet Painter provides a handy solution for that: create a spherical planet, then make it your own with the numerous tools it provides for customization. Use the heightmap to change the elevation of the terrain, then paint their surface with any color you fancy, applicable via the robust brushes on offer.

When choosing to create a new planet, the program lends you the ability to tweak the visual fidelity of your planet by picking from the 8 detail levels available, informing you of the polygon count and memory requirements for each, among other things.

Upon inputting your preferences regarding the detail, radius, terrain style, and preset of your world, you'll be met with the generated planet and the editor itself. The playground is now open: you may modify your new spherical world however you see fit.

In our case, we played around with the brushes for a while, then introduced some mountain-sized, alien-looking terrain onto our planet. It's very tempting to experiment with the wide range of colors available to you, and having pink-looking terrain on our planet was the last thing we thought we'd do. Lo and behold, our planet became even quirkier than we intended with those pink shades.

When you're done with your creation, you can rest assured knowing that there's more than one way to save it: as a voxel model, map projection, or 3D model. When electing to export as a voxel model, you can choose the voxel size. Map projection exporting, too, offers some additional options by letting you export in grayscale or color, as well as pick a resolution.

Planet Painter is a fun tool to use, so if you ever wanted to model your own planet, trying it out will be worth your while.