Request: Mesas and Canyons

[erichlof]

Request: Mesas and Canyons

[IceCreamYou]

Glad you're interested in the project!

I just committed a new "steps" feature that makes an attempt at this. Try playing with it in the demo viewer and see what you think. It goes pretty well with the Simplex method and the EaseInOut filter. (Try increasing the maxHeight to get a better effect.)

The way this works is it does a filtering pass that takes the output from other terrain generation functions and divides it into levels.

I can think of two other approaches:

• Something I call "feature picking," which is the idea of picking a random location and placing some kind of feature there like a mesa or hill. This seems to be a good starting candidate for mathematically modeling a mesa
• Coming up with a method that could create "faults" along which significant height changes could occur, probably by using some variation on Brownian walks. This is nontrivial and probably not a lot better than what I just implemented.

I'll probably implement something that looks like the first approach at some point. 😃

[erichlof]

@IceCreamYou
Wow thank you so much Isaac! The new steps feature is exactly what I was looking for! Playing around with the settings I was able to create mesas (that stick up like mountains, Monument Valley style), stepped layers (Grand Canyon style), and fault-line canyons with a smooth, flat top shelf that erodes down to another flat ground (Canyonlands NP style). Maybe a river could be placed on the bottom flat-shelf or ground level.

But in any case, this is really cool! Back in 2001 I made a terrain artillery-style game in OpenGL in C for Windows, called Virtual Bombard. Here are some old screenshots from my game:

Just messing around with Math.sin, .cos, .tan, etc I was able to get some pretty neat random terrains. But your terrain project goes way past what I was able to do just tinkering around with random trig functions. I wanted to re-do this game using Three.js and now I actually have access to an awesome terrain plugin!

Thanks again - I'll keep checking back for more updates. :)

[IceCreamYou]

Glad it's working for you! I'll look forward to seeing what you make 😃

It's also worth noting that the Steps filter is composable, so you can mix it in with other algorithms like DiamondSquare using THREE.Terrain.MultiPass if you want results to be a little less flat.

[erichlof]

Oh I hadn't thought of that - thanks for the tip! :)