Article 11: GeoControl's infinte detail

A quickie inllustration of GeoControl's Cut function. This opens up the possibilty for infinte procedural detail. GeoControl Version 2 may have this feature developed to enable exporting tiles.

The following gives a quickie illustration of a feature that Johannes alerted us to over on the GeoControl forum. The terrain I used is the Nan Angmar from the Workflow, so the function works just as well with imported terrain. I gradually zoomed into an area of the mountains on the south side. The sequence consists of 6 cuts, each progressively increasing the resolution by x4. There are two shots at each res.

It involves the Cut special function. Basically what you are doing is taking a terrain, setting your filters and erosion and cutting a tile from it. This tile is then exploded to occupy the same area as the original terrain. After a series of these cuts in effect you are going down into the terrain at finer and finer resolution : a la incredible shrinking man.
GC Version 2 plans to improve the functionality and maybe so that one can explode a whole terrain and export at a greater res in a batched fashion?
You can see from the terrain sequence that at the finer resolutions, the terrain is perhaps not quite of the right character. This is because I've employed the same set of filters at every cut step. If you changed these over the course of the zoom, you could in fact introduce varialbilty of the fractal character of the terrain. Inhomogenous terrain but over scale. Very cool!
At the moment that would be a time consuming process. I think that a script (or whatever) could automate the changing of filters at the various scales.
This is pretty exciting stuff- especially if combined with a tile import/export architecture in version 2. For the moment it has limited use for ME-DEM, though it could be used as the basis for the a closeup render of river networks that we're thinking ofdoing in Workflow Part3.
The terrain that this process produces though is quite spectacular!