So Random... - 02 - And a little bit of color

Good news everybody! The first generation 3D engine is nearing the end of its development process. I am so close! Still, I need a few more day so until then let's get some semi-filler going!

Last time I left you with a grayish height map generated with Perlin noise that could be considered a fair approximation of a section from a natural land mass. I concluded with some musings about merging several height maps, one used for giving shape and another for giving detail, but today I am going to continue in a new direction.

First, I chose a standard water level. Based on the relative distance to this water level I tried to assign colors to the resulting map to make it seem more "natural". Of course, only using height for coloring is less than ideal. You get a few cases where huge jumps in height generate some colors that don't really make that much sense geologically speaking, but we can get some nice results:

Blue is the water mass. The darker the blue, the deeper the water is. On the shore we have sand that is represented by shades of yellow. Then green and brown for different elevations, up to white as we get to snow. The snow also has a nice little "bloomish" effect. All color transitions except for sand and white snow are perfectly smooth, while sand and snow show some discrete color shifts. This was done to enhance the visuals and is purely cosmetic. The height change on these types of terrain is still smooth.

To test the generator I tried to make it render 10000 maps, but I grew bored after 1200+. Still, it works and can generate a pretty varied set of maps, like this mostly water based one:

I will probably have to exclude such maps because they have too much water. The algorithm is not capable of generating and infinite number of realistic maps (but can generate a huge number of maps, including ones that are ugly/unrealistic/undesirable based on integer/floating point max size) and currently it outputs 20000 unique maps. This one I really like:

So generating small maps in great numbers works fine. It is even fast enough that you can create an interactive map navigator. It won't be snappy, but it will work. But what about creating really big maps with high detail? Like I said last time, one of the great advantages of Perlin noise is that you don't need to create and store the entire map with high detail. Or low detail. You create just as much as you need, cache it if you think you'll need it for latter, discard otherwise. But still, it is a good experiment. I created 8192x8192 high detail image. This took over 4:45 minutes and ended up occupying 270 MiBs RAM. Saved on disk as a 10 MiBs PNG. Blogger won't allow me to embed such large images, so I will post a screenshot of the image:

I created and even larger image. This one is 13312x13312 and creating it, saving it and immediately trying to load it almost crashed my system. It took Windows a few minutes to recover:

But colorizing based on height is not the only thing you can do. You can also try to texture everything. To better illustrate, I'll show the before/after results, with before being just Perlin noise and after being the full textured result:

This post is already too long so I won't explain today how you texture this. Maybe next time. 

Especially since there is one more thing I must talk about right now: the above image, while it looks pretty good, has one huge obvious fault. Look at the top of the snow surface. It is perfectly flat. You see, these maps are generated 100% based on Perlin noise. It is just noise, nothing more. Luckily, you have a bunch of parameters and a random seed. After a lot of experimenting with these values (except for the random seed), I managed to turn noise into something that looks a little like a land mass. With looks being the key word here. These parameters were chosen based on aesthetics. I did not try to see a 3D render of the map and decide what is best for that. And what is best for that is not the best for the aesthetics of a color coded topdown map. Which is again not the best for the aesthetics for the textured map. Long story short: I have chosen a set of parameters that creates good looking maps, but sacrifices detail in parts that are less visible in favor of parts where this detail would make more of an impact. In the color coded map renders, you did not notice that the top of the snow are is flat. I used most of the detail information to render a more convincing set of low heights. The parameters will need to be rebalanced for this texture based rendering. The flatness is more apparent on a "colder" map:

As a first step I'll need to make oceans not take up any detail resolution and use the freed up resolution for mountain tops. If this is not enough, I'll try the combination method I wrote about last time. I'll leave you for today with a render of a larger section: