Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
Very cool stuff going on here. Keep posting - I am following what your doing with some interest. Tho I calculate my rivers using a different technique I can see why this way might be really super fast compared to mine. Presumably you can determine the height map from the initial stipple field. Id like to see how this looks in 3D or with shaded relief.
The speed is hampered by the weighted random selection it has to make at each step of computing the paths. Once that is done though, it can be saved and re-used so that the river network can be recomputed for different precipitation surfaces. At some point I'd like to do an animation of the river network shifting with varying weather. Tying the lakes into that too would be particularly cool. Overall the images above took a few minutes to generate. Being a bit more clever about it ought to speed it up, especially if created some specialized data structures.

3D isn't that practical given the way this works. It essentially only knows about aspect, not slope or elevation. Artificial DEMs that don't look horribly fake are really hard to do which is why I tried to come up with a way of generating decent looking rivers without a DEM.