Procedural weathered fractal terrain in OpenSCAD

thingiverse

I wanted to create a procedurally-generated terrain map on a globe, using OpenSCAD. I'll get around to the globe eventually. First I had to get the procedural terrain generation to work, and then the weathering/erosion algorithm. This is the result. Because this terrain is generated procedurally from a random number seed, you can get an infinite variety of landscapes. To read about how I developed this, see my blog article [_Simulating erosion_](https://www.nablu.com/2021/05/simulating-erosion.html), in which I describe both the terrain generation algorithm and the weathering simulation. The end of the article includes a JavaScript applet to can play with. You can use the OpenSCAD customizer to set parameters, but I suggest instead you read the comments at the top of the file to understand how the parameters work. The script lets you generate a single-color model, terrain only, or separate land and sea parts for multi-color printing. The weathering algorithm is slow; I recommend no more than 2 passes. Also, the greatest practical value for the number of subdivisions used on the fractal surface is 7. You can use 8 but the resulting file is large and has way more resolution than you need for printing. Read the comments at the beginning of the script!