Some Random Landscapes

I don't have any 3D views of the fractal landscapes I've been making to show you yet, as I'm still working through the different implementation options. I did get a little distracted with the 2D views of the landscape this morning, though, and play with the colouring scheme.

First of all, let's start again with the example landscape used in yesterday's post, only with slightly more sober colours and a bar on the right showing how the height values map to actual colours:

[caption id="attachment_363" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="Fractal coastlines."][/caption]

Now that looks reasonably neat already, in a "my first atlas" kind of way, but clearly there's a lot of information missing. We can see this if I plot the height values in monochrome, giving the landscape a more "plasma cloud" appearence:

[caption id="attachment_364" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="Plasma cloud landscape."][/caption]

Now we can see the extra information, but we've lost a lot of the sense that what we're looking at is a landscape. It looks more like a cloud. We can get some of that back by combining the two approaches and using different shades of blue and green:

[caption id="attachment_365" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="Shaded landscape."][/caption]

Now this looks a lot better. I think the water looks quite reasonable using this scheme, but the landscape is a bit... homogenous. Is every part of the land covered in grass? How boring!

We can make things a bit more interesting by adding a thin band of "sand" around the coast, and some "mountainy" colours (and snow!) higher up, like so:

[caption id="attachment_366" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="More in depth colouring scheme."][/caption]

Now this looks better, the sand in particular. The mountains look okay, but not quite right. Something's a little off. That's not what mountains actually look like. We also don't have any rivers or above sea level lakes. These are problems I'm going to look at later, after I get a reasonable 3D display system working. In the mean time, though, here are a couple more 2D landscapes for your viewing pleasure:

[caption id="attachment_367" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="A bit more snow and an inland sea."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_368" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="Yet another coastal region."][/caption]