Hills and Mountains

Is it possible to generate foothills and mountains like in the image below? It’s a beautifully crafted terrain from the Sims 3 world adventures and I can’t figure out how to get realistic looking shapes like that.

Maybe it’s because I suck at world machine :stuck_out_tongue:

Just generate mountains and hills in separate generators and combine them?
You’ll probably want to use a mask to restrict the addition of hills to the valleys and maybe blur the valleys before combining.

Thanks for the response. I was meaning the shape of the hills and mountains rather than the height.

I can’t seem to shake the obvious Perlin noise look at that level of detail.

I managed to hack the game’s camera and got a better look at the hills. I think the shapes may have been modeled, converted to height map, then combined like you said.

Can you post a screen shot of what you have so far? (any why it’s not enough four you)

I think you might have some success with voronoi.

You might also look want to take a look at my voronoi noise macro (http://nkblog.nkdev.de/?page_id=446) which creates terrains that look somewhat/a bit simlar to what I think you want. Screenshot: http://nkblog.nkdev.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/wm-voro-slate.jpg

I don’t think I have been very clear but I solved my problem anyway.

Basically I wanted to generate more defined shapes of hills rather than squiggly shaped ranges. I have used the Voronoi macro before and it works great but not for this cause.

The only way I can think of doing this other than using hundreds of generators is to model them in a 3d package…

Hello blender!

It’s just a quick example (not the shape I was looking for but now I can make it) of a mesh.

Now we convert to height map, import into world machine, and reduce the horizontal scale

I wrote a script that looks to see if a height map pixel is in a mesh face (in an obj file) and get the height using its normal.

Apply a blur to the hill

The mesh is of course made from triangle faces that don’t look very realistic so the blur removed the straight edges.

Resize the hill

Just subtract it from itself in the combiner device but it looks a bit too smooth…

Generate some boulders

Using some Perlin noise and the erosion device.

Add to the hill

Using the combiner again and we are done. Well it’s not completely the same as the mesh but it is pretty close.

I have a new question. What noise gives the best results with the erosion devices? I’ve noticed really nice looking gullies and rocks on certain terrains I use them on but I can’t seem to do it on a small scale. Thanks for your help.

Edit: Never mind. Not only did I forget about the geological time enhancement option, Stephen also provides an excellent example in the concavity selector example file.

Also how did you render that screen shot? It looks very nice.