Cursed Antiborean Geomorphology
I recently ran across a neat program called Wilbur, which incorporates a variety of algorithms for simulating erosion to create realistic-looking DEMs. Since the Bedmap 2 heightmap I've been working with contains ugly artefacts from the composite remote-sensing techniques used to create it, I've been playing around with using Wilbur to make it more realistic.
The parameters aren't perfect (the result is noisier than I'd like) but the topography bears a much closer resemblance to real-life landscapes.
But then I thought: what if I used Wilbur's erosion algorithms on a heightmap derived from a 6-mile hexmap? The result is extremely cursed-looking but also has the surreal whimsy I'm aiming for with Antibor, shunting the ontological status of the 'hex' from a gameplay abstraction to an entity in the fiction. Is it a pointcrawl? Yes! Is it a hexcrawl? Yes!
My Wilbur recipe for this was:
- Fill basins
- Add noise (3%)
- Precipiton erosion
- Incise flow (strength 2)
- Precipiton erosion x2
- Incise flow (strength 1, exponent 0.4)
- Fill basins
Edit: threw a segment of the heightmap into Blender for a quick 3d visualization:
