Op 02/09/2023 om 00:03 schreef Samuel B.:

> Gaea really does seem like the best one for simulating real-world geology (or an
> approximation of it, anyway), but I'm pretty sure to get anything useful from it
> you have to pay for a full(er) version.
> 
Yeah, that is what I noticed immediately indeed :-/

I guess I shall stick with my own familiar combination of
- Leveller (my oldest);
- Bryce (a free copy, sometimes interestingas basics);
- GeoControl (old but my best one);
- Terrabrush (well...);
- World Machine (I love that one);
- Wilbur (simple and surprising);

and any combination of their terrains together.

-- 
Thomas

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Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> Op 31/08/2023 om 23:12 schreef Bald Eagle:

> > Maybe change some of the vine-growing rules to instead of being random, seek the
> > lowest direction to "flow".
> >
>
> Hmm... worth a try indeed. Thanks for the suggestion!
>
> --
> Thomas

So, I've come across the "A*" path-finding algorithm a few times in the past
year or so - I think that if you used the heights of all of the possible path
"pixels" to score your optimal path, then you could use that as the vine-growth
rule.

If your mesh had an associated texture applied to it, then the different
strata/soil types would have a different hardness / percolation / erosivity, and
you could use that to control the radius of the "vine" - eroding more strongly
in soft soils, and hardly at all over rock.
Then you might have places where the soft soil was the lowest path (initially),
but then lower strata were harder, and another equivalent soft soil erosion path
was along a deeper soft soil patch, which would then dominate the erosion
pattern.

Perhaps add an elliptical parameter to erode the sides of a long-standing
erosion path to simulate collapse of the walls and filling of the erosion path
with silt and aggregate.

Red Blob Games has a good write-up on this,
https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html

and Daniel Shiffman at NYU / The Coding Train did a 3-part series on
implementing this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKYlikFAV4k

Just some extra thoughts.

- BW

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