Universe

Solar system explorer

In the Universe web-app you can explore our solar system or explore infinite procedurally generated other planetary systems.
Universe uses no external images to render the planets or background. All visuals are generated using only code.

What started out as a small fun project to get more familiar with matrices turned into a 3 week non stop code binge. I wanted to learn to use matrices for rendering objects combining a field of view, a zoom factor, and individual scaling of objects. I recently watched some videos about our solar system and thought a visual model of the system would be a good exercise.
I started out with just drawing circles and it actually looked pretty nice:

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First version of the app using just circles to render the planets

You can view this, and two other basic PoCs here:

https://misc.sandermarks.dev/linear-algebra/

After this little proof of concept I decided to expand into a full project. I had some goals I wanted to achieve:

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Sometimes things don't go according to plan
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Sometimes the random planets are quite pretty
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Playing with noise