GSoC Week 3 : Further into Terrain Generation

I spent most of my third week by adding improvements to the noise functions and experimenting with different parameters of it. In my previous blog on Simplex Noise I explained the different terminologies used in Noise such as Amplitude, Frequency , Octaves and Persistence. Here I will be showing the different type of terrains generated by changing these parameters.

Just to recall, the current API call for creating a heightmap texture is
soy.textures.Heightmap(texture_width, texture_height, frequency)

So I am planning to add amplitude, number of octaves and persistence as parameters to the API as well. But for now, just to avoid confusion for the new developers I have kept it simple. So here I will be manually altering the parameters from libsoy library to show some of the terrains created by the Noise functions I implemented.

So here a terrain with persistence equals to 0.8, number of octaves added is equal to 12 and frequency equals to 5. I am currently working on removing the sharp edges from terrain as shown in the example. We can smoothen the terrain by reducing the frequency and increasing the persistence. So here is another example (persistence = 1.0,octave = 12,  frequency = 1).

 

Increasing the frequency will bring in some new sharp peaks bur the overall appearance of terrain will remain the same. Here is an example below after increasing the frequency to 10.

I will be adding a dictionary in the future with some custom keywords such as mountains, plateau, desert, etc. which will automatically select the best possible terrain configuration for the user. But due to the bad performance for rendering larger terrains, I am keeping it in my bucket list until completion of some terrain rendering optimization techniques and automatic texture mapping of terrains. So for now I am moving onto my next milestone, but I will keep optimizing and improving the procedural terrain generation mechanism.