Thingiverse
Procedural weathered fractal terrain in OpenSCAD by Amatulic
by Thingiverse
Last crawled date: 4 years ago
I wanted to create a procedurally-generated terrain map on a globe, using OpenSCAD. I'll get around to the globe eventually. First I had to get the procedural terrain generation to work, and then the weathering/erosion algorithm. This is the result.
Because this terrain is generated procedurally from a random number seed, you can get an infinite variety of landscapes.
To read about how I developed this, see my blog article Simulating erosion, in which I describe both the terrain generation algorithm and the weathering simulation. The end of the article includes a JavaScript applet to can play with.
You can use the OpenSCAD customizer to set parameters, but I suggest instead you read the comments at the top of the file to understand how the parameters work.
The script lets you generate a single-color model, terrain only, separate land and sea parts for multi-color printing. The weathering algorithm is slow; I recommend no more than 2 passes. Also, the greatest practical value for the number of subdivisions used on the fractal surface is 7. You can use 8 but the resulting file is large and has way more resolution than you need for printing. Read the comments at the beginning of the script!
Because this terrain is generated procedurally from a random number seed, you can get an infinite variety of landscapes.
To read about how I developed this, see my blog article Simulating erosion, in which I describe both the terrain generation algorithm and the weathering simulation. The end of the article includes a JavaScript applet to can play with.
You can use the OpenSCAD customizer to set parameters, but I suggest instead you read the comments at the top of the file to understand how the parameters work.
The script lets you generate a single-color model, terrain only, separate land and sea parts for multi-color printing. The weathering algorithm is slow; I recommend no more than 2 passes. Also, the greatest practical value for the number of subdivisions used on the fractal surface is 7. You can use 8 but the resulting file is large and has way more resolution than you need for printing. Read the comments at the beginning of the script!