The LOTW projects remind me of a project I once participated in many, many
years ago. It was called the Magrathea project. The project was done on the
Acorn RISCOS platform and I lost the code long ago. It used fractals to
generate a kind of height field. The field was drawn using small triangles and
depending on the height the color was adjusted. In those days only 256 colours
were available and the results looked nowhere near as fancy as the LOTW project
but it was a fun project.

I think the landscapes look terrific and I would bet that when printed on
glossy photograpic paper (10x13cm) you could fool a lot of people into
believing that they are actual photographs of real landscapes. What were the
rendertimes for these pics and what hardware did you use?

-- 
Maurice

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SomeOne wrote:
> 
> I think the landscapes look terrific and I would bet that when printed on
> glossy photograpic paper (10x13cm) you could fool a lot of people into
> believing that they are actual photographs of real landscapes. What were the
> rendertimes for these pics and what hardware did you use?
> 

Thanks.

Render times usually 2-3 hours on an AthlonXP 2600+.

Here is another version.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 01 May. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Attachments:
Download 'lotw-t5.jpg' (90 KB)

Preview of image 'lotw-t5.jpg'

cbsplu$au4$1@chho.imagico.de...
> SomeOne wrote:
> >

Christoph, as usually your rocks rock!
Is there a link to a png version? it's a shame how jpg kills details.

Marc

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"Christoph Hormann" <chr### [at] gmxde> schreef in bericht
news:cbsplu$au4$1@chho.imagico.de...
> Here is another version.
>
Like Marc, I am impressed by your rocks, Christoph! I am a professional
geologist, but I would certainly be fooled by this. I have seen it in lots
of places. Congratulations!
Which brings me to a question: I am trying to model this kind of sedimentary
or tectonic layers, and especially to control their angle of dip. This last
I find frustratingly difficult. Apparently, you have mastered this. How did
you do it?

Thomas

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These landscapes look really very well!
I especially like the 3rd one: It reminds me on Ayers Rock in Australia. 

I wonder how much of the detailed structure comes from the 
texture and how much from the topography (which, I guess, is 
an isosurface). 
[And of course, I am curious how it was done... are there chances that 
you publish some hints? :) ]
 
> Since this work seems rather boring to me i got the idea that one could
> have the computer automatically do this using standard optimization
> methods. 
>
I actually had a similar (but easier) experiment some time ago: 
It was about zooming into the Mandelbrot set (film-like) by having 
the computer find interesting regions by itself. 

In this case, the primary rating function was the variance of the 
chosen image regions. 

While this simple method is probably not applicable here, something 
like that could at least be used to sort out images we certainly do 
NOT want (by doing a 150x100 test trace). 

> So my idea is to render a set of images (maybe 10-20, something like a
> reasonable population size for an evolution strategy) in small size
> every week and have a public voting on them and use this vote for the
> ranking.  Then maybe render the highest rated image in larger, generate
> the next step population and start again.
> 
When visiting your homepage the last time, I wondered why there was the 
possibility to have the landscapes rated. Okay, now that becomes clear...

Wolfgang

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Marc Jacquier wrote:
> 
> Christoph, as usually your rocks rock!

Thanks.

> Is there a link to a png version? it's a shame how jpg kills details.
> 

I will put better quality versions on the website when i start the real 
LOTW-2.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 01 May. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Thomas de Groot wrote:
> 
> Like Marc, I am impressed by your rocks, Christoph! I am a professional
> geologist, but I would certainly be fooled by this. I have seen it in lots
> of places. Congratulations!
> Which brings me to a question: I am trying to model this kind of sedimentary
> or tectonic layers, and especially to control their angle of dip. This last
> I find frustratingly difficult. Apparently, you have mastered this. How did
> you do it?

Generating a directed structure in rocks is quite simple in principal, 
you just have to non-unifomly scale the patterns you use for the surface 
structure.  Of course getting this 'look right' is not so easy.  And 
more complicated things like actual folding (i.e. a change of the 
direction of the rock layers) is more difficult.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 01 May. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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"Christoph Hormann" <chr### [at] gmxde> schreef in bericht
news:cc1deq$907$1@chho.imagico.de...
> Generating a directed structure in rocks is quite simple in principal,
> you just have to non-unifomly scale the patterns you use for the surface
> structure.  Of course getting this 'look right' is not so easy.  And
> more complicated things like actual folding (i.e. a change of the
> direction of the rock layers) is more difficult.
>
I agree. The scaling is indeed easy, but then to rotate the pattern around x
or z (y again is straightforward) for changing the layers' dip, is not
giving expected results. That is what frustrates me most...

Thomas

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