Technique · Fields
Terrain and maps
Generative landmasses as terraced contour maps, with liquid folding and Voronoi territories.
Terrain and maps is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Cartographers conventionally light shaded relief from the top left; lit from below, hills can read as hollows.
- In 1854 John Snow's map of a cholera outbreak in London, in effect, drew a Voronoi cell around the Broad Street pump.
- The contour interval, the height between neighbouring lines, is chosen for each map; the closer the lines, the steeper the ground.
- Contour lines were used to chart sea depth before they were used to show the height of land.
- A Voronoi diagram gives every point to its nearest seed; it shows up in cracked mud, in the patches of a giraffe's coat, and in the borders of maps drawn by distance.
The mathematics
- A terrace is floor(h x n) / n: the height snapped down to one of n levels, and here n is 14.
- Where the height changes fastest the contour lines crowd together: their spacing is inversely proportional to the slope.
- The border between two Voronoi cells is a straight line, the perpendicular bisector of the two seeds.
In art
- Hypsometric tinting, colouring the height bands from green through brown to white, is how atlases have shown relief for nearly two centuries.
- Mapmakers generalise: they smooth coastlines and drop detail, which is also what a smoother noise field does.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree · Radiolarian shell