Grand Designer

Awesome software! Now I am finally able to recreate the surface of my skin!

It is a very useful and fast program for planet visualizations. It takes much more time to get same results with classical 3d software. The developer is also very helpful. There are some features I would like to see such as a layer system that you can mix an image channel with procedurals or two different procedurals for more complex results and maybe a masking system for special areas with special textures. (for instance to create an area that there are only small craters) If you need to create lots of planets for your work I would suggest this software.

Great piece of software overall. I don't like the dithering feature as-is. Some feature ideas for future updates: 1. Viewport-only TXAA or multisample option for dithering. It should be off for snapshots. 2. Global option to turn off dithering. 3. Improve UE4's atmospheric scattering shader to match closer to Grand Designer's one, or provide more options in the UE4 sample. 4. Custom material texture maps: custom colour-coded materials. 5. Bit more documentation on how the various cloud / atmospheric scattering techniques work would be good for those of us trying to reproduce similar results in an external engine. 6. Mesh decimation preview; right now you'd have to continuously repeatedly export to see what it looks like. Could always use external decimation program on top, so not a big deal. Also LOD options would be more convenient. 7. More emissive options would be great; emissive land, emissive sand, emissive clouds even! Totally unrealistic but might be good for more stylistic exaggerated art styles. 8. Alternative UV mappings? Lat-long is great but can run into warp issues at poles. 9. HDR colour selection; while exported values should probably be srgb unorm, intermediate values can totally be unclamped. HDR viewport with tonemap option would also be good.

The perfect worldbuilding program, I'd say its fantastic for any DM, writer, gamedev or just a hobbyist.

This program remains the most complex program dedicated to making planets that I've been able to find. But that's kind of the issue. It's great but it's starting to show it's age. I'd be more than willing to buy a V2 if one were to ever be made, especially if it meant an upgrade to the graphics and overall realism of the planets. It is unfortunate though that the developer doesn't appear to be working on one, or if he is, he hasn't said so. I understand as I can only imagine how much works goes into a program like this, but still, I'd hate to see this fade away. TLDR, can I recommend this program? Yes, but hesitantly. If you buy this, do it knowing that you are buying it in a state that likely won't see another update ever again.

Creative!