Terrain generation

An implementation of the diamond-square algorithm to generate realistic looking heightmaps.

Requires Boost program options and Boost chrono.

Build with make. For usage instructions, see --help.

The default output format is ASCII. For a greyscale binary Netpbm, use the --pgm switch. This can be converted to other image formats using e.g. the ImageMagick convert utility.

./height --pgm > map.pgm
convert map.pgm map.png

Furthermore, a heatmap filter can be applied with ImageMagick by applying a color-lookup table (CLUT). In the following example, a 1x4 CLUT is generated, and the -clut option will translate the black-to-white values in the input map to graded colors.

convert map.pgm \( xc:black xc:black xc:blue xc:cyan +append \) -clut heatmap.png

Light maps

$ ./height --roughness 5.0 --size 500 --light 5.0 --pgm > light.pgm
Seed: 44336164721644
$ ./height --roughness 5.0 --size 500 --seed 44336164721644 --pgm > map.pgm
Seed: 44336164721644
$ convert light.pgm light.png
$ convert map.pgm \( xc:red xc:yellow xc:blue +append \) -clut map.png
$ convert light.png map.png -compose multiply -composite composite.png

$ ./height --size 1920x1080 --seed 1290978805858707 --roughness 3 --pgm > bg.pgm
$ ./height --size 1920x1080 --seed 1290978805858707 --roughness 3 --pgm --light 5.0 > bglight.pgm
$ convert \( bg.pgm \( xc:white xc:green xc:green xc:PaleGreen3 xc:DodgerBlue \
                       xc:DodgerBlue xc:DodgerBlue xc:DodgerBlue +append \) \
             -clut \) \
          \( bg.pgm bglight.pgm -compose screen -composite \) \
          -compose multiply -composite composite.png

License

If you would like to use this project in a free and open source software stack, let me know via a message on GitHub and I will slam on the license you need.