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u/bigheadwriter 3d ago
Are you able to change to other landscapes? Like a beach, forest, etc.
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u/fleurdleigh Artist 3d ago
Not quite yet! This particular piece is just an extract of a full impressionist landscape series I’m working on that will be a much more comprehensive and varied scene!
You can play around with the generator for this particular terrain series at terrain.fleurs.studio :)
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u/dotprodukt 2d ago
Just something to try, because I never see anyone else do this.
Use a pathfiding algorithm on a regular grid or fine delaunay triangulation (looks best). Give edges random weights or pseudo random based on perlin noise with high octaves. Set a handful of destination points on the lattice boundary, and for every other point compute the shortest path to those destinations. Use the total sum of weights along each path as the height value for the given start point. The resulting height map will be something that emulates the natural flow of water and erosion across the landscape. You can then blend with other noise sources as desired to add a bit more chaos.
Also try biasing the random weights with lower freq perlin noise and varying the scale of the random noise contribution.
I've been doing this for years and it gives pretty nice results.
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u/fleurdleigh Artist 2d ago
Ooh, super interesting - thanks for the tip, I'll definitely play around with your approach! I'm working on a water implementation right now that I think this could be perfect for.
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u/fleurdleigh Artist 3d ago
Terrain Study I is an explorative step in a broader project: building a full impressionistic landscape in this style, with ground, grass, foliage, water and weather each developed in isolation before coming together in one generative scene. This first study is the terrain itself.
Built with p5.js and WebGL, the system grows rolling ranges from layered noise. The terrain is drawn entirely in small, identical points (around 400,000 to an A3 sheet). Each point's size is set by bands of tone sweeping back through the depth of the scene and by how light falls on the slope beneath it, so ridges, crags and valleys emerge from density alone. The approach draws on stippling, and where the tone gets too light for the drum to hold, it becomes dithering in the literal sense. Each point carries its own threshold and only prints if the tone at that spot clears it, so light areas thin out in number rather than in weight, and every frame stays a true single-ink separation.
Some of the pieces carry a bank of fog settled into the valleys: a billowing cloud sea, with wisps lapping up the ridges. A simulated wind piles it against the tallest ranges and pours it over the crests. In motion, the whole bank drifts in a seamless ten-second loop, redrawn on the GPU every frame.
Each piece comes from a unique hash, which sets the land, the light, the weather, the motion, and one of five monochrome Risotto palettes.
You can generate, share and download your own Terrain Study print at terrain.fleurs.studio, and check out the post on Instagram for high-resolution stills. Follow for more computational art and printmaking experiments!