Sometimes people ask me for information about generation of spherical planets and related stuff, so I decided to make a small collection of links to resources that I myself found useful. (I will update this list if I find something else that’s interesting and/or useful enough.)

• Spherical mesh generation:
  • Simple Cube Mesh Generation in Unity3D — a very basic example for beginners
  • Creating an icosphere mesh in code — a simple example
  • Cube Sphere — a very detailed example of spherical mesh generation from a cube in Unity, including math formulas behind all calculations
  • Creating an Octahedron Sphere in Unity — another detailed example, includes texturing and generating tangents for normal mapping
• Procedural generation of terrains:
  • Libnoise tutorials and complex planetary surface example
  • Polygonal Map Generation for Games by Amit Patel
• Making Worlds — series of articles by Steven Wittens about creating spherical worlds; discusses topics such as level of detail, heightmap textures and normal mapping
• Creating Spherical Worlds — presentation about procedural generation of spherical planets in Spore