Spores procedural terrain texturing

Ocean Quigley (Art Director for Spore) once again has made a new update on his blog.  In his most current post, he talks about textures on generated planets, sharing more of his prototype artwork.

It was really important to me that the textures conform meaningfully to the terrain. I didn’t want to have them look like a carpet covering the landscape, ignoring it’s topography. So I came up with this approach. (incidentally, I’ve just recently discovered World-Machine, which does a masterful job at this sort of thing, and more)

This image shows the steps going from the terrain’s topography (known as a heightfield) to the final texture. The heightfield had to be filtered to get the structure to emerge. And various other textures had to be blended in and integrated.