Celestia Forums

Ladies and Gents,

Please find below a couple of images of an Earthlike world I've been working on, as a test case for generating maps using Fractal Landscape generation and image layering. The maps you see below took roughly 30 minutes to create (and about 2 weeks of testing and practicing technique )



Same image without clouds, so you can see the landforms.



I'd be really grateful for any opinions that anyone can give me.



Regards,

Cormoran

It looks like a great start.

Can the generator include snow on high mountaintops?

Thanks Selden

The Generator(s) I use, Fractal Terrains (with a little help from Wilbur), does climate mapping as well as relief, so the landscape includes not only Mountain ice and snow, but also subtle colouration from the biomes.

The image below has a mountainous region to the right of the picture.



For some reason the climate generator never shows deserts, so I paint those in by hand.

Btw, the cloud map was simple. I grabbed one of the images from XEarth and pasted the image into the alpha channel. Worked pretty well I think.

Cheers,

Cormoran

Nice thing. Only a few complains:

All the structures are looking very well randomly spreaded. This is usually not true for real planet surfaces. You will have such things as foldings of large mountaineous areas (see Rockies, Himalaya streching up to Afganistan, ...), plains of water and woods (Amazonas), rows of islands along a line or bow etc.

In addition the structures are looking quite small. What is indended to be a continent here, looks like being a small state or island only.

Probably the settings for the fractal generator don't allow such fine tuning.
Could it be a solution to let the results of different landscape creations intersect each other?

greets, maxim

Thanks for the input Maxim,

For reference, here's the map so far:



The landscape does require a lot of sculpting after it is generated, but its possible to add areas like fjords and to sculpt the mountains into more folded-looking terrain. Valleys can be added in the same way, though lakes and rivers above sea level need to be added to the texture as opposed to the landscape file.

I'll post any improvements as I make them

Regards,

Cormoran