
Elevation Control - dougb5
http://www.redblobgames.com/x/1728-elevation-control/
======
Flux159
I see blog posts from redblobgames posted sometimes and I really like how in-
depth the explanations are. I remember reading about 2d height maps and map
generation for a side project I was working on a while back and the
explanations he gave for why he was using a particular algorithm were
fantastic (in addition to the interactive demos):

[http://www.redblobgames.com/maps/terrain-from-
noise/](http://www.redblobgames.com/maps/terrain-from-noise/)

[http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...](http://www-
cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/)

~~~
mungoid
Totally agree. It was years ago when I found their blog post about hexagonal
grid generation and it was the most informative one I had seen anywhere. Still
is today. Plus the interactive parts give the sections so much more meaning.

I often find myself reading posts on their site just for the heck of it.

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theandrewbailey
Unless it's modeling islands, I find most terrain generators unnatural, at
least from above. I wonder how feasible (and realistic looking) it would be to
build a terrain generator using a bunch of fluid simulation to model plate
tectonics, weather, and erosion.

~~~
trynewideas
Just tectonics:

\-
[http://davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/blog/](http://davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/blog/)

\-
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/platec/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/platec/)

Tectonics with simulated weather:

\- [http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-
generati...](http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation)

Just fluid dynamics:

\-
[http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html](http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html)

~~~
dirkc
I absolutely love this one:

> [http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-
> generati...](http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation)

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akx
I had kind of the inverse idea some time (years) back -- generating polygonal
contour maps, and heightmaps out of them. See the demo here:
[http://akx.github.io/islands/](http://akx.github.io/islands/)

------
Animats
Terrain generation is usually fractal, and you can start from a plane, or a
hand-created surface and let the fractal algorithm fill in detail. That's old.
The cool new thing was seen in Moana, where the water surface generation
allowed animator control with the water being a character.

That created an uncanny valley problem. When the water "goes character", it
looks a bit strange, because it suddenly stops obeying physical laws. That's
OK for a Disney princess story, but used with high rendering realism it looks
wrong.

