Introducing Pollock

Pollock is the code-name for our new terrain generation system. Why Pollock? This system went rogue for a couple of days and started producing things that did not look like terrain and more like Jackson Pollock paintings:

It seems mad randomness at first, just like Pollock, but there is a lot of order in this chaos (and also what appeared to be a buffer overrun error somewhere in the code.)

Here are some images of the system when it behaves as expected:

The colors you see in these renders are not the final landscape colors. Each color identifies a different layer of more detailed material that will go there. These are placeholder materials Pollock is creating for you.

Pollock's main input is photographs, which you provide to suggest the geography of each biome. In case you want to create a full continent, Pollock will ask you some additional basic facts about elevation, temperature and wind direction.

In continents, you will get nice surprises like a desert appearing on one side of a mountain range:

While the other side of the same range is all made of fertile land:

This has happened due to all the moisture coming from the sea precipitating over one side and having only dry air go over the mountains.

It takes around five minutes to set this up from scratch. The system will so some pre-processing for a few minutes (usually less than five) and that's it. In less than 15 minutes you can complete the creation of an entire continent that spans over a dozen different biomes.

We are in the last stages of completion for this system. There are two main features missing: the addition of forests, rocks, etc. and plugging this with the lake generator to get inner lakes. Right now the system only does ocean.

This system will be included in the Voxel Farm 3 release.