Swiss Turbulence and Terrain Generation

Terrain generation is one of the oldest intersections of computers and procedural generation–Mandelbrot and his colleagues noticed that many of the fractals were very landscape-like. But while a basic random terrain is easy to generate, a good looking terrain can take some effort. 

Despite the ubiquity of Perlin noise, raw Perlin noise doesn’t make for very convincing terrain. It’s easy for it to end up with frequency of detail that looks wrong. So when Loren Schmidt linked to this article series by Giliam de Carpentier it immediately caught my attention. Article 3 in particular discusses some extensions to the terrain generation pipeline that add calculated erosion and mix noises to create a much more convincing height-field.

Gillam originally worked on it for his thesis work and has released some source code for the algorithms in question, so if you’re looking to generate better terrain, go take a look.