Since 1996, Ken Perlin has published a whole bunch of extremely cool Java applet demos on his web page, which he uses to teach his students at NYU and anyone who wanted to learn Java and computer graphics. One of his demos was a procedural planet generator!
I learned a lot from his papers and demo code, and based the design of The Sims character animation system on his Improv project.
I learned a lot from his papers and demo code, and based the design of The Sims character animation system on his Improv project.
https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/ (expired https cert)
https://web.archive.org/web/20001011065024/http://mrl.nyu.ed...
Here's a more recent blog post about a new one using WebGL, Dragon Planet:
https://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=12821
Here's another blog post about how he's been updating his classic Java applets by rewriting them in JavaScript:
https://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=27980