May/June Lite Entry: Gulf of Malabor

[gilgamec]

Even though I'm using Photoshop for compositing and special effects, I'm still going to keep as much computation as possible in my own code. This has several advantages:

• Flexibility - most of what I can do easily myself isn't offered in stock Photoshop filters. There might be custom plugins to do these things, if I could find them and were willing to pay for them.
• Controlability - The parameters used by both the basic Photoshop filters and other plugins are designed to be used interactively, and so they don't suit my purposes very well.
• Reproducibility - Photoshop's built-in Clouds filter, for example, provides quite nice fractal noise. However, besides the problem of controlability (how do I change fractal dimension, scale, or any number of other parameters?), there's the matter of reproducibility: it's different every time I call it. Within the context of one image, this is fine: I can save it and use it again. But what if I want to render a version in higher resolution? Since my coastline is based on fractal noise, it would change every time I change resolution (and have to rerender the noise).

For all of these reasons (plus, it's more fun this way!), I'm keeping everything I can out of Photoshop. For instance, here's a version of the map with coloration by altitude. The altitude in this case is created by a multifractal, which increases fractal dimension (makes the terrain spikier) at higher altitudes.


I've also moved what lighting effects I can into my own code. For instance, rendering the above with Lambertian lighting on the terrain gives:


(I've also done some work on rivers, which I'll leave for the next update.)