Procedural vector map elements -- some experiments

[gilgamec]

As those who have seen my Challenge entries will know, I'm interested in creating procedurally generated maps, because:

1. I'm far too lazy to do a map manually, and
2. I have no artistic talent anyway.

This thread is for showing my experiments with procedurally-generated map elements, like forests, mountains, cartouche decorations, etc. -- mostly in a hand-drawn- or engraved-style.

First off, I'm looking at forests. I'm going to take the forest style from this tutorial as a starting point, and see how far I can get completely procedurally.

The distribution of trees in the forest is pretty simple. I take a Poisson point distribution, drop a circle at each point, and take this as a first step.

The actual shape of trees is going to be more irregular than just circles, of course. First, the general shape shouldn't be a circle, but more of an egg shape. I can alter a parameter and get shapes of greater or lesser egginess.

Next, to create lobes, I'm going to make the tree silhouettes the overlap of a bunch of circles. First, I put a Poisson point distribution inside the general tree shape. Second, I put a circle around each point, then take their outside boundary as my tree boundary. (I'm not drawing all of the circles here, only the ones that actually contribute to the boundary.)

Replacing the circles in the forest with these shapes already greatly improves the forest.