Terrain Generator Done by Manoo Gharse Vanessa Ferrao Karl Fernandes Rohit Arondekar Amruta Kunkolienkar

Objective The project aims at developing a cross platform (Windows & Linux) fractal based terrain generator that will enable 3d content creators to utilize the generated terrain in their creative process.

What does terrain mean? The surface features of an area of land.

Movies Almost every movie now involves heavy use of special effects, and many a times, the scenes depicted in movies are not real – but generated using computers. So where will this generator be used… Games Games have become more and more engaging and realism has become just another feature. Again believable environments with outlandish terrain add to the gamers' visual experience. Simulators Simulators used to train aircraft pilots or land vehicles like tanks usually require realistic conditions in which the pilot/driver can be put to the test. Research Terrain data collected of other planets such as Mars via satellites and other means can be visualized for more effective study. Digital Art/ Neography The use of computers to create images unattainable through conventional photographic tools.

To generate a terrain we would need some basic knowledge of fractals

Fractal Terrains  Fractal: A geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry.  The key concept behind any fractal is self- similarity. An object is said to be self- similar when magnified subsets of the object look like (or identical to) the whole and to each other.

The fractals' growth mechanism can be visualized very easily with a simple example. Start with a “+” sign and grow it by adding a half size “+” in each of the four line ends. Repeat the exact same process recursively as many times as desired. We'll call this the Pluses' fractal: Notice how the “+” sign grows into a rhombus in very few simple steps. If we count the number of “+” in each stage, we can see how quickly its complexity grows...

How do we generate the terrain?

TERRAIN GENERATOR Block Diagram of the flow of project TERRAIN GENERATION ALGORITHM POST PROCESSING CONVERT HEIGHTMAP TO IMAGE HEIGHTMAP Height map ( 2D array) Processed Height map RENDER GUI

Heightmaps Heightmap or Heightfield is a raster image used to store values, such as surface elevation data, for display in 3D computer graphics. A heightmap can be used in bump mapping to calculate where this 3D data would create shadow in a material, in displacement mapping to displace the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface, or for terrain where the heightmap is converted into a 3D mesh.

Representation of heightmaps as arrays

Representation of heightmaps as images

HEIGHTMAP SURFACE RENDERED Representation of heightmaps as images

Terrain Generators – A Commercial Perspective

Our Inspiration: Terragen Terragen is a scenery generator, developed for creating photorealistic images Proprietary, closed source, thus cannot be used commercially without license Hard to use GUI, reduced scope of experimentation

Terragen: How It Works

Terragen: The Output

What makes Terrainium tick? Truly cross-platform Terrainium will be operational on Windows, Mac OS & specially Linux, as there is no software at all for Linux Available free of cost Do we need to elaborate? Easy to use We envision Terrainium as very user friendly, exploitable by anyone with creativity

What next Cross-platform Our needs Such that the software should run both on Linux and Windows with little or no modifications to the source code. Availability of graphics libraries To create the GUI Support for Object Oriented paradigm 1)Reusability 2)Separation of concerns 3)Scalability

Our choice for implementation language - JAVA Cross Platform (Windows, Linux and Mac OS) Free Powerful Used Extensively Our choice for IDE is Netbeans 6.1 Our choice for Rendering is POV Ray Reasons

Software Project Management Plan The division of labour for the next 3 weeks along with are targets are as follows OO Design (Vanessa, Manoo and Rohit) Simple prototype (Amruta and Karl) Study of two algorithms for generating terrains: “Plasma/Subdivision” and “Perlin Noise” (Rohit, Amruta and Karl)

References 1. Introduction To Fractals html 2. Tutorial for generating fractal terrains tml#intro 3. Terragen Website

Any questions or feedback will be appreciated. Thankyou