height field to sphere?

[waldronate]

Procedural Terrain is easy. Good-looking procedural terrain is fairly easy. Physically plausible procedural terrain is hard.

Climate is easy, basically being a lookup into a table by seasonal rainfall and temperature. Moisture transport is hard. Heat transport is harder. Moisture transfer and heat transfer are interdependent, which makes them harder.

Rivers are straightforward: liquid water flows downhill. Getting the water uphill is hard (it's dependent on both moisture transport and heat transport).

[xoxos]

TY i expect that if i complete the course i'll report the same. in physical modeling i am not a stickler for perfection.. too tedious. one of the most enjoyable self-relevant functions is the amount of correlation between reality and what can be produced by simple (sometimes 'ideal') methods. i expect you also got most of the enjoyment out of wilbur implementing each new function and gauging the results.

i like to be useful, but i'm not particularly ambitious about being "what people use". if public utility wasn't a part of it i'd spend all day outside.

having spent a decade emulating specific, mercurial items, emulation at a more encompassing scale should broaden my procedural thinking.. but given meagre accreditation (while i certainly have received enough praise for synthesizers, i am quite aware of where i am not qualified to claim accuracy as i do not have eg. academic funding requiring authoritative correctness.. which is most fortunate because this ultimately limits me to my own discretion) i know there is as much folly at either/any scale and am consigned to enjoy the process rather than sweat it (lol and the occasional, inevitable extricative whinging directed at the precedent..)

:p