Landscape of the week - technical description

The pictures here are created with a POV-Ray 3.5 scene that contains a lot of parameters. For example a pigment function for the terrain isosurface could have one to influence the scale:

  function {
    pigment {
      granite
      color_map {
        [0 rgb 0][1 rgb 1]
      }
      scale Param_1
    }
  }

The value of Param_1 is given by POV-Ray's internal random number generator:

  #declare Param_1 = 1.5+rand(Seed)*1.2

The range for these parameters is chosen to lead to nice looking results. With a lot of parameters this is usually a compromise between large variety but tendency to generate crappy results with some combinations on the one hand and strong similarity of the pictures on the other hand.

In the current version the aspects of the scene influenced with these parameters are:

• the camera position and angle
• the light position
• the terrain geometry
• the terrain texture
• the sky
• the clouds

The seed values used for the random numbers are chosen automatically when starting the render. This means the individual scene appearance is totally controlled by the program. I do not throw out any improper results so despite of previous tests there is always the chance that some combination leads to a funny or boring picture.

I will try to improve the program by adding more variation and eliminating possible flaws.

Christoph Hormann April 14, 2002