Once I found a mildly cogent description
( http://www.midnightbeach.com/jon/pubs/3D_Fractal_Landscapes.html )
it became pretty simple to put together a little program to
generate a mesh of fractal landscape. Just an hour or so to get it
written and working, scaling properly and all.

Now... what do I do with it? Possibilities abound - tile them? Blow up 
the first one, and trace the innards on each sub-triangle? Figure out
how to animate an infinite zoom into the fractal that way?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Scruffitarianism - Where T-shirt, jeans,
     and a three-day beard are "Sunday Best."

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Darren New wrote:
> Once I found a mildly cogent description
> ( http://www.midnightbeach.com/jon/pubs/3D_Fractal_Landscapes.html )
> it became pretty simple to put together a little program to
> generate a mesh of fractal landscape. Just an hour or so to get it
> written and working, scaling properly and all.
> 
> Now... what do I do with it? Possibilities abound - tile them? Blow up 
> the first one, and trace the innards on each sub-triangle? Figure out
> how to animate an infinite zoom into the fractal that way?
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
I vote for the zoom option.  You'll hit precision problems somewhere 
along the road to infinity but it might be interesting to see the first bit.

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Darren New wrote:
> Once I found a mildly cogent description
> ( http://www.midnightbeach.com/jon/pubs/3D_Fractal_Landscapes.html )
> it became pretty simple to put together a little program to
> generate a mesh of fractal landscape. Just an hour or so to get it
> written and working, scaling properly and all.
> 
> Now... what do I do with it? Possibilities abound - tile them? Blow up 
> the first one, and trace the innards on each sub-triangle? Figure out
> how to animate an infinite zoom into the fractal that way?

How about making an erosion routine? You could "rain" points down to eat 
away the landscape. Just a thought ;)

~Sam

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Darren New wrote:

> Now... what do I do with it? Possibilities abound - tile them? Blow up 
> the first one, and trace the innards on each sub-triangle? Figure out
> how to animate an infinite zoom into the fractal that way?

Converting it into an isosurface (by some kind of "cross-approximation" 
- has this ever been done?) to get an infinitely zoomable smooth surface 
would be thrilling... I dream of doing the very same with my 
heightfields generated from SRTM data or even topographic maps - but the 
  necessary math would be as mind-blowing as CPU-choking...

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

Now playing: The Lake (Mike Oldfield)

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> Converting it into an isosurface (by some kind of "cross-approximation" 
> - has this ever been done?) to get an infinitely zoomable smooth surface 
> would be thrilling...

Yeah, that would be cool. I'd call that "reimplementing the fractal 
generator in SDL." :-)

I just spent about 10 times as long as I spent on the original program, 
trying to get a second fractal that can patch into the middle of the 
first fractal with the edges lined up, and it has me completely stumped 
why all the numbers come out right but the actual picture looks wrong. 
Edges don't line up, jaggies poke way out of the way, etc. :-) Moving on 
to something else for the moment...

(If anyone wants the code as it stands, I can post it, but it's not 
POV-specific.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     You know it's time to trim your beard when your
     wife stops calling you Husband and starts calling
     you Husbollah.

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High!

Darren New wrote:

> 
>> Converting it into an isosurface (by some kind of 
>> "cross-approximation" - has this ever been done?) to get an infinitely 
>> zoomable smooth surface would be thrilling...
> 
> 
> Yeah, that would be cool. I'd call that "reimplementing the fractal 
> generator in SDL." :-)

In 2005, I heard that Tor Olav Kristensen had developed a conversion 
tool that generates isosurfaces from heightfields (really smooth 
isosurfaces, not pixelized ones like with Christoph Hormann's Iso-HF 
tool!)...

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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