KAIVERSE → NMS-Quality: Research & Recommendations

*Research only. No code changed. This is the plan + what to download.*

The one root cause of "fake depth / crappy textures"

We have been lighting procedural noise bumps on top of photo textures that don't line up. The crater you see in the photo is NOT where the geometry has a crater, so the shadows "tease" depth the surface doesn't have. Stacking fog/sky/atmosphere on top just muddies it.

The fix is not more shaders — it's matched asset sets: for each planet, use a *color map + normal map + HEIGHT map that all came from the same source*. Then displace the geometry by the height map. Now the canyon in the picture is a real canyon, lit correctly. This is exactly how real planet renders (and NMS's hand-authored worlds) get believable depth.

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1. Download matched planet maps (biggest single win)

For each AI's planet, pick a real body and grab its color + normal/bump + height (displacement) maps. Drop them in /textures as <name>.jpg, <name>_normal.jpg, <name>_height.jpg.

• Solar System Scope — Solar Textures — NASA-based color + bump, 2k–8k, free. https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
• JHT's Planetary Pixel Emporium — color + bump + normal + specular for every planet/moon, free. https://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html
• NASA 3D Resources (real DEM elevation = true height maps for Moon/Mars/etc.) — public domain. https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/ and https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources
• 16K Solar System pack (diffuse + normal + spec + roughness + displacement + emission) if you want one bundle. https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/5oNl/solar-system-in-16k-texture-pack

2. Download CC0 ground materials (for the close-up surface)

When you're walking, you need tiling rock/sand/grass with their own height+normal so the ground is crisp and 3D up close.

• Poly Haven — CC0, no signup, PBR terrain materials (color+normal+rough+displacement). https://polyhaven.com/textures
• ambientCG — CC0 surface materials, same maps. https://ambientcg.com/

3. Adopt proven libraries (stop hand-building)

• postprocessing (pmndrs) — production-grade bloom, SSAO, god-rays, tone-mapping. Replaces my hand-rolled bloom and looks far better. https://github.com/pmndrs/postprocessing
• @takram/three-clouds — real volumetric ray-marched clouds + aerial-perspective atmosphere (the actual NMS cloud/sky look). https://www.npmjs.com/package/@takram/three-clouds
• Reference planet engines to study: https://github.com/prolearner/procedural-planet · https://github.com/olivermulari/planet (Babylon)

4. Engine verdict (honest)

• Stay on three.js. It has the most planet examples + the cloud/atmosphere/postprocessing libraries above. Switching to Babylon.js = full rewrite for a marginal gain.
• BUT: we are on three.js r128 (old). The libraries above want a newer three.js. So step 0 for libraries = upgrade three.js (a compatibility pass — our custom shaders use r128 syntax like vUv/texture2D that newer versions handle differently).

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Recommended order (for Anti / next code session)

1. Download matched color+normal+HEIGHT maps for each planet → /textures. *(No code; pure asset drop.)*

2. Add a height-map displacement step so geometry matches the photo (real craters/canyons). *(Small, targeted code change — works on current r128.)*

3. Add Poly Haven CC0 ground materials for the walked surface.

4. Upgrade three.js, then drop in postprocessing (bloom/atmosphere) and optionally @takram/three-clouds (volumetric). *(Bigger compatibility project.)*

Reality check: steps 1–2 alone (matched height maps + displacement) will do more for the "real depth" feeling than everything I stacked this week. Steps 3–4 get the cinematic atmosphere/clouds. None of it requires matching a AAA studio — it requires the *right assets* feeding *proven libraries*, instead of hand-built shaders fighting mismatched textures.

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Sources

• Solar System Scope textures — https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
• Planetary Pixel Emporium — https://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html
• NASA 3D Resources — https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/ · https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources
• Poly Haven — https://polyhaven.com/ · ambientCG — https://ambientcg.com/
• pmndrs/postprocessing — https://github.com/pmndrs/postprocessing
• @takram/three-clouds — https://www.npmjs.com/package/@takram/three-clouds
• procedural-planet (three.js) — https://github.com/prolearner/procedural-planet