Creating interesting landscapes without fractals

Landscape Visualization programs have been using fractals to generate artificial surfaces for many years. Indeed GenesisIV supports this technique using the fractal plugin. Although fractal landscapes look natural at first glance, repeated exposure may bring disappointment to those who expect eroded mountains as they do tend to produce a certain sameness of appearance. This tutorial demonstrates a simple technique to produce artificial fjord like landscapes without using fractals. There are many variations that can be applied to this idea.

Walkthrough

After starting up GenesisIV open the Heightfield editor. If you have a registered version you'll probably want to start a new project, but otherwise we'll overwrite the Fractal Landscape demo project by clicking on Clear Project in the File menu. You should now have a blank - white - landscape canvas. You may find it helpful at this stage to open up the 'Height Display' dropdown, change the colur scheme to RGB and set the height range (min, max heights) to the range you expect to use.

The next stage is to select the manual contour tool, and 'scribble' several lines on the canvas at a range of different heights. You lines should cross at almost random, i.e. you are not drawing contours.

Once you're satisfied with that you have then select the interpolation tool and select as much of the landscape as you can, then run Nearest Neighbour interpolation in the usual way. It can be useful to check the extrapolate box here. Once that has finished run a single Trend Analysis interpolation with the smoothing transform checked.

At this point we decided to use the Landscape Terraformer plugin the apply a 5% glaciation transform to the landscape, but you may decide to skip this. We also moved the colours back to the default from RGB as these are easier to use with the flood tool.

You may decide to apply other plugin transforms, or edit the surface directly with the mask or other tools at this point to fine tune your landscape.

Our next step is to apply water. If you're not after a shoreline landscape this step isn't necessary of course, but it does work particularly well with this sculpturing method. We chose a flood point at a height or around 170 metres in this case.

Finally save and exit the Heightfield module.

We've rendered the image shown below in the Photorealist Renderer at fractal level 4. We've chosen a viewpoint close to the sea looking intoward the islands as this gives good results. Landscape colours are nearly defaults, but we've added an extra grey texture to the middle range terrain fractal for high slope values, and increased the below treeline height slightly to ensure a more prominent green layer near the sea.

The image could be further enhanced by adding vegetation and tweaking fractal and atmospheric effects.