When creating an outdoor scene, "Floating Skyscrapers"  (unfinished, very!)
last year, i wanted nice rolling hills in the distance.  Not too symmetrical,
not too uniform, with ridges and hills and broad shallow depressions and
rises.     But most of all, I needed to know altitude(x,y) so I could place
buildings, cars, etc.

After expeimenting with some ideas, i settled on a mesh on an x,y grid with z
values determined by a hill(x,y) function.    This hill function is a sum of
many individual hill component functions.  It worked great - but due to a
compiler bug, didn't render right and I gave up.    Turns out that the
compiler bug was due to a hardware problem - almost everything ran 99.999% of
the time, but anyway that's a long story... (it may also explain the colour
dispersion bugs i had back when i was working on that.)


I gave the hill component function, a macro named bulge( ), lots of
parameters to give it variation and nonsymmetry.  I write these functions
intuitively, but it's based on a gaussian function   exp(-r^2).

 
I'll post a copy of my FSLAND.POVI  file in the scene-files group.




> I'm hoping to make an image which will mostly be a series of grassy 
> hills in the rain. I've got the clouds, I think, and the rain's a task 
> I'm willing to take a shot at. Grass will be a nightmare of its own and 
> obviously a lot of fudging is required. I've started working with the 
> hills, but that's where I've run into the first problems. 
> I really don't want to generate any height maps for this one. My 
> preference is to use an isosurface (I'm using the Superpatch) with a 
> kind of hilly function. I thought of multipying a couple of sine waves 
> together, but the results on that have so far been pretty terrible. 
> ... 
> Lummox JR 

-- 
Daren Scot Wilson
dar### [at] pipelineocm
www.newcolor.com

Post a reply to this message