troyunrau

I start with perlin with several scales, mixed together. But then I do a lot of extra stuff.

For example, a filter of my own creation I call "swiggle" helps create curved linear features. Sample of what it does to a checkerboard.

I like to find things like steep gradients and erode them to help form mountain ranges that have passes in them and such. So I'll do something like a Voronoi map, where the density of cells is related to the map gradient. Then calculate features per cell. That way great plains stay relatively flat.

I'm currently hung up in doing erosion and deposition properly. Not like a fake single pass version, but an iterative version that moves things over time. That has led me into some scientific computing rabbit holes where geoscientists do real simulations. But python cannot handle that well.

Yeah, colours to elevation.

Since I am mostly using Python as a math engine, and python isn't a very good math engine (even with numpy), performance isn't great. The map above is about 15 minutes to generate. I could spend hours answering the why 😂

But basically I'm just storing elevations in a 2D array. Then applying various filters to it to make things more geologically reasonable. Start with noise, add mountains in places that make sense, fjords, floodplains! Etc. I think I have about 18 processing phases now. But each step requires a lot of math -- math that GPUs are very good at.

I also haven't tried to optimize things too much.

I've largely rolled my own tools from scratch in python when playing with terrain generation, including writing my own perlin generators and everything. But that's mostly because I want to learn about the methods more than actually produce anything useful. Sample.

Content! Yay!

Looks cool -- how do you like blender for the task?

Generally speaking, you usually have an idea of what it is before you lick it.

But any minerals mercury would be usually be a no go. Here's a fun one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calomel since we're talking about chlorides ;)

Having to enter/exit through the chimney seems a choice. Is this their primary exit?

This is actually very funny somehow

No. Potassium chloride is more bitter.

Source: am geoscientist. Licking rocks is one of our university trained skills. I kid not.

Tangent: we printed these t-shirts in undergrad that said "You know you're a geologist when you can say with a straight face: have you tried licking it?"

Yep.

As a geoscience, I like spicy rocks

Interesting 🤔

The style changed so dramatically over the few years.

Rotten potatoes. Not good.