Terrain Study I

[u/fleurdleigh]

[u/estrella_del_rock]

I get a japanese classic painting feeling, gorgeous.

[u/fleurdleigh → u/estrella_del_rock]

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was going for with this piece! I have a compilation book of Hokusai’s Fuji woodblock prints which were a significant reference :)

[u/lxr417]

This awesome, really nice work

[u/fleurdleigh → u/lxr417]

Thank you :)

[u/fleurdleigh]

Terrain Study I is an explorative step in a broader project: building a full impressionistic landscape in this style, with ground, grass, foliage, water and weather each developed in isolation before coming together in one generative scene. This first study is the terrain itself.

Built with p5.js and WebGL, the system grows rolling ranges from layered noise. The terrain is drawn entirely in small, identical points (around 400,000 to an A3 sheet). Each point's size is set by bands of tone sweeping back through the depth of the scene and by how light falls on the slope beneath it, so ridges, crags and valleys emerge from density alone. The approach draws on stippling, and where the tone gets too light for the drum to hold, it becomes dithering in the literal sense. Each point carries its own threshold and only prints if the tone at that spot clears it, so light areas thin out in number rather than in weight, and every frame stays a true single-ink separation.

Some of the pieces carry a bank of fog settled into the valleys: a billowing cloud sea, with wisps lapping up the ridges. A simulated wind piles it against the tallest ranges and pours it over the crests. In motion, the whole bank drifts in a seamless ten-second loop, redrawn on the GPU every frame.

Each piece comes from a unique hash, which sets the land, the light, the weather, the motion, and one of five monochrome Risotto palettes.

You can generate, share and download your own Terrain Study print at terrain.fleurs.studio, and check out the post on Instagram for high-resolution stills. Follow for more computational art and printmaking experiments!

[u/Usohatchi]

Beautiful work!  Makes me wanna try rendering like this - I have a wave simulation that might be interesting

[u/fleurdleigh → u/Usohatchi]

You definitely should! I have some poisson disk sampling/eulerian fluid surface experiments in this style that look pretty promising :)

I’ll share them eventually!

[u/Herodont5915]

It would be amazing if you could somehow do renderings like this in 3D and walk through it

[u/fleurdleigh → u/Herodont5915]

This actually is a 3d scene with an isometric 30/45 camera!

The terrain is generated from a height field and points are placed with ray-marching, the shading comes from the slope of the surface from a light with direction and elevation, the fog is volumetric and the wind is blowing over and around the ridges.

It looks 2d as a stylistic render choice, but I can move the camera around the scene freely as I could with any other 3d scene :)

[u/jeffyclassify]

🔥 Looks like the Harry Potter version of one of my family ancestors paintings we have at home 🤗 super nice!