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Terrain Images

Each image here is linked to a full size version. Click on the image for a much larger version. Each image is approx 600x500.

Fractal Terrains

This images are of the combination of the fractal terrain generator with the colouring provided by the color ramp generator. Colouring is designed to represent a typical sea, sandy shore, green grass and snowy mountain tops.

In some of these images, you will see a small coloured cross. This is the axis geometry and is located on the world origin so that you have a sense of perspective.

Sea levels are not used and so you see the full terrain.
A full terrain with sea level and a fairly rough surface so you can see snow-capped mountains and the flat sea
A before and after shot with this and the next one. A simple terrain with reasonable smoothness
The same shot as above, by now rendered in wireframe to illustrate the underlying structure.

Heightfield Conversions

One very popular use of the fractal terrain generation routines is to create cloud textures. Cloud textures take the 3D information and transform it to 2D and add some colour, so the effect is very simple to generate. Of course, using a 2D image means that you might want to go back as well.

In the Cartographic/GIS arena, a very common way of sending around height information is in the form of images. A (typically) greyscale image contains a coded height value for each pixel. The shade of the pixel determines the height. The is the natural opposite of the height to image process, and both of these capabilities are available.

The screen shots below show the different example applications and how you can create textures and height fields from images.

Basic image generator creating a greyscale image. The color values provided are ignored and the internal values used.
Image generation using different colours. This time the minimum colour is set to blue illustrate making a cloud texture.
Another example showing the use of colours. White is not the only colour you can use as this example shows - a fade from blue to red.
The big test of the system. On the left is a normally generated fractal terrain. In the middle is the image generated from that terrain. Then, to confirm the process works correctly, on the right is the 3D representation that has been generated from the image. This is the ImageMapDemo class in the examples/terrain directory.