Grand Designer Reviews

It's better suited to producing cartoony, exaggerated planets, but if you have patience and an eye for subtlety you can tweak the settings to produce some very convincing results.

Absolutely stunning piece of software! Looking forward to even more features like binary / ternary / multiple stars, extreme weather simulation (hurricanes), river networks, reflective salt flats, etc. Will we be getting these? Only time will tell...

Grand Designer is an amazing software, nowhere else have I found such a way to create planets of any kind at will. Sure, it has a little learning curve to get really good at making your planets look exactly as you want them to, but what is there in life that doesn't take some experience to get good at? Grand Designer is a great way to create planets, asteroids, and with enough practice, some pretty decent stars (however stars are really hard to get to look right since they're not the main focus of what GD is made to make) I highly reccomend Grand Designer and especially the pro version, as it is better, as to be expected from it being the "pro" version.

OMFG!!! This new update (1.2.0) implements everything I wanted from the start. I bought Grand Designer some time ago and was already satisfied with its features. I have made some really beautiful assets with this software, first using the vanilla version, and after a while using the PRO version (16k textures give me great pleasure). But NOW.... The new "features" system is just AWESOME! Now I don't need any other program to finalize my planets, I can do everything in Grand Designer and then just export to Unity. BOOM! Congrats, man, this software is worth every penny of its full price. No, really, I want to give you a hug right now. Can't thank you enough for creating this masterpiece.

The software is OK. It generates planets, moons ,asteroids the OBJ, MTL and textures. But there is no integration with Unreal Engine. You will need to import and make your own material by hand. The samples provided can hardly reproduce the look of the software. Therefore, there is no easy integration as described in the video. You will need to build your materials manually and you will have a hard job to achieve the look of the software. In short, it is an object and texture generator. Only that.

Well was easy to learn. Had a planet made and exported to lightwave 3d in about 3 minutes and that time included learning how. Nice maps and interesting. When your in the program the clouds are moving in real time. Did not see that till I zoomed in closer. This would be great for far away shots and really would need to study more for fly buys or close ups. I will update this in the future when I get some time to play some more but I like how easy it was to use the software and going to give a big thumbs up. I think if this develops it could be a spectacular plugin and lightwave should grab it.

Every time I tried to export the planet no files were generated. I thought one could increase the details' resolutions. Despite bigger texture sizes, planets look blurry and unusable for anything serious. I asked Steam for a refund and was denied because I spent more than 2h (3h 50min) "playing the game". What an absurd, this software doesn't work as expected (no export/bad quality) and I have to keep it? Also, If you have a 4K monitor, expect small and blurry fonts.

I have been playing around with this for about 5hrs, and frankly I am still not 100% happy about using it to create planets (which was one of the reasons I bought it). The planets that I have created, don't look anywhere near as crisp as the planets I created soley in Photoshop. The way this software exports (actually just a snapshot) is something I am definately not sold on, using a render engine would be a much better way to go, especially for the kind of digital art this is will be used for. I can see a time when crisp images can be rendered, but at this time I think I will only be using Grand Designer to create moons and asteroids. UPDATE: After a lot of time trying to improve the output with post processing in Photoshop with little improvement, I cannot recommend this software, at least not at the asking price. The quality of output is the big let down on this software, the developer really needs to re-think the snapshot approach.

The software is not being kept up to date, there are many bugs, the most annoying one is not being able to load your own planets. The textures look really noisy even at an 8K reolution, the fractal maps are blurry. Overally i feel like i've wasted 80$ on this software.

First of all, this is of course not a game, but a software aimed at digital artists. It is a hidden gem though! While I do not work as an artist professionally, I have been creating digital art since the mid 1990s, and in doing so have used a wide range of 2D and 3D applications. My main focus are space and Science-Fiction. If am working on a texture for a planet within a space scene for instance, that usually means painting from scratch with the occasional use of my own and public domain stock photos, as well as NASA resources. That is time consuming, and while fun, not always practical. [u]Grand Designer eliminates two distinct disadvantages:[/u] [olist] [*]It minimizes the time it takes to create a texture, and due to it's randomization features, you won't run into the problem of repeating patterns too much. [*]When painting a 2D texture intended for use on a 3D object, you usually don't really have a full grasp of what it would look like until you have created the object, placed it in a scene, lit it, and test rendered it. While you can always tweak settings more later, Grand Designer gives you a very good idea of how the end result will look while you are still in the initial creation process. [/olist] The software is very intuitive, and especially if you have prior experience with 2D/3D software packages such as Photoshop, Vue, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, 3D Studio, and Bryce - to name a few - this will not require much, if any, learning. Is the asking price justified? A clear 'yes' from me, and I am including the PRO edition in that. One of the main reasons is that this software allows you to generate professional level 16k textures which usually hold up even in extreme close ups. Add to that the real time creation process, time saving, and ability to easily add and remove features, $80 is more than fair. It also doesn't feel clumsy and unfinished like most Early Access titles. If you want to expand your horizons, and add a time saver to your workflow, then look no further. [u]     [/u] [i]I'm not affiliated with the developer in any way; this is an independent review and my opinion.[/i]