Juno: New Origins | Making Minmus (how to make planet beginner guide)

Hi guys, today we're gonna be making Minmus from a blank template to clear the misconception that creating planets is hard.

Go to planet studio, create a planet and select the first one to start from – "Blank".

The way we're gonna do this is not with textures (which would be cheating), but with the procedural generation tools in the terrain generation panel.

So, to start, Minmus isn't grey. Let's make it a minty color close to the real one. Go to the terrain gen panel. Uncheck the simple terrain generation button (blue) if you see nothing.

Click on the subbiomes modifier, and set the color of the primary sub biome to 87AB9D (or whatever you like).

Rebuild the planet by pressing the refresh symbol looking button.

Well done! But, Minmus isn't flat. It's flat in some places and is bumpy in others, and the color between those places is different. Before addressing that, we'll set the radius and gravity of the planet:

Now let's make it bumpy. Entirely bumpy. We'll worry about the flats distribution later. Click on the height pass, then the plus button up top, find the noise modifier, and add it. Then add a generate height modifier, and make sure the three go in this order (you can even enable the data flow like I did to show the noise flows into the generate height which flows into the update height):

If you rebuild the planet you'll notice it only changed slightly. That's because the frequency of the noise is low (1). Let's change it to 10. Click on the noise modifier. Change the frequency, and rebuild.

Now it looks a bit more acceptable. To make the hills higher or lower, change the generate height modifier's Min Height and Max Height values. Experiment with both the frequency and height for a bit until you find what looks right. I ended up with this:

Now, let's add the flats. We're gonna be adding another noise modifier, but this time in the biomes pass. Delete the get constant, and in its place add a noise modifier. "In its place" are the key words, since you'll want it to feed into the biomes and decide by the range on the noise the "width" the biomes take up. But before that let's make the actual flats biome. Go to the tab above the terrain generation, and add the biome.

Back to the terrain gen panel. I set the frequency of the biome noise to 3. Inside the biome modifier let's do a simple range so that half of the noise's values are the biome we've been working with and the other half the new flats biome.

This looks kinda ugly, because, first off, the flats biome is completely black. So color the sub biome how you like. Also, set the second value of the slope range to 1, since by default it's all slopes and changing the primary data color won't do anything unless you do that.

Second, let's add overlap between the biomes, so the first one transitions nicely into the second one.

Now, let's make it so the hills aren't on every part of the planet, but just the first biome. Drag the three modifiers that make the hills into the first biome making sure they're in the correct order.

Epic! Now all that's missing is a bit of polish. For me, I immediately realize that there's something off with the transition between the flats and bumps. Looking at reference images of Minmus you'll notice that the transition itself is bumpy, and once it reaches its peak the terrain gets flatter. We can achieve this by going into the biome noise, changing the type from Perlin to Perlin Fractal, increasing the octaves to 4, and decreasing the gain to 0.4.

To make the size and distribution of the flats look closer to that of KSP I also decreased the frequency from 3 to 2 and changed the fractal to Value Fractal.