Fractal Continent Generator

[waldronate]

If you go back and look at the first two I posted (the unblurred and thresholded ones) you'll see the noise I'm talking about, which doesn't seem like either of those you mentioned.

As an example of an fBm surface with similar characteristics to the ones that you posted, consider the attached image. All that blurring and thresholding should have done is effectively reduce the image resolution, not change the characteristics of the surface.

Adding different types of shapes at different levels is a good algorithm. It should be possible to allow arbitrary images as the starting point, as long as the initial image meets the basic requirements for the shapes at that scale. I would expect that using a distance field in the areas to be placed and using that distance field as the guide would be a helpful optimization.

[vither999]

Ah, yes, that does have a similar noise pattern on the edges. My mistake; I'm still working on understanding the different noise algorithms I've seen.

I'm not sure what you mean by blurring not changing the characteristics of the surface. If we were to take two any two different surfaces and blur/smooth them a large amount, wouldn't they end up looking similar to each other? Or am I not thinking about the characteristics of a surface correctly?