FTerrains - Reconstruct heightfield?

[töff]

Nice! Are you planning to render it back up to 3D, or keep it flat?

[Sigurd]

I'm all ears for methods to render it into 3d.

What I'm trying to do really is go as far as I can with whatever accuracy I can maintain.

Right now I'm investigating patterns that might work with the heightfield. I'm happy with whats beneath me now I have to bring it to life.

Sigurd

[su_liam]

If you want to get rid of those swirly bits, increase the octaves on your noise. Each time you scale up the resolution(or zoom in) by an amount equal to the lacunarity add one to the octaves.

Let's say 8 octaves looks good on a 1024 by 1024 image of a 300mi by 300mi area and your lacunarity is 2, then you will need 9 octaves for a 2048^2 image or an image covering 150mi^2 with the same resolution. If you zoom in to 75mi^2 or increase resolution to 4096^2, you would need 10 octaves for approximately the same quality.

Lower lacunarities will rack up octaves a lot faster on zooming, but often look a lot better with fewer unpleasant artifacts. Remember that octaves cost time so there is a compromise involved.

Noising and smudging the HF can be very useful, though and gives it a human touch and control.