I have a growing sphere in space, and I thought of having a procedural generated texture over it. Since it is growing, I thought a fractal would be a great choice, because more details would be visible the larger the sphere get (and I could mess with some parameter over time to have it animated).
A quick Mandelbrot implementation in GLSL showed it would be too expensive to have it in the devices I am targeting; also, I don't know how to map a cool looking fractal over complex plane onto a sphere without distortions (I expect the players to fly around this sphere in every direction, so there should be no "glued" edges or collapsed points), neither I have the background to devise/project a fractal over the spherical surface myself (probably was done before, but I could not find).
So weighting the requisites of the procedural texture:
- Fast to run, for low-end/mobile GPU;
- Over a spherical surface domain;
- Growing in details with growing in size;
- Possible to animate (BONUS);
- Cool looking (of course);
then I thought it might be impossible within the constraints. But since I am no expert in this fractal thing, I thought I could ask it here first before scraping out the idea.
Maybe it is really not a fractal I need, and there is some other kind of noise with growing details I could use. Do you know of such noise generation procedure?
Do you know of any noise generator with uniform distribution over spherical sufaces, or any fractals whose domain is a sphere?
Can you suggest any alternatives for my situation?