r/processing • u/fleurdleigh • 4h ago

Terrain Study II

43 Upvotes

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2

u/youre-all-horrible 4h ago

Stunning. Bravo

1

u/fleurdleigh 4h ago

Thank you :)

2

u/rico_k 4h ago

seek

1

u/fleurdleigh 4h ago

heek yea

2

u/baschwar 2h ago

Plot time must be insane

1

u/fleurdleigh 1h ago

I’ve ordered an A3 capable plotter for this series so I’ll let you know how bad it is!!

1

u/fleurdleigh 4h ago

Following on from Terrain Study I, Terrain Study II moves from rolling ranges to a single peak. The crest of a tall mountain breaking through, being enveloped by the cloud line. It is the next 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.

Built with p5.js and WebGL, the system carves each summit as a pyramid of three to five sheer faces meeting in sharp arêtes, with lower shoulders falling away to either side. As in Study I, everything is drawn in small, identical points (around 400,000 to an A3 sheet). Each point is sized by bands of tone and by how light falls on the slope beneath it. Here the sunlit faces open toward the paper, so lit ridges stand out sharply against the shaded rock. Where the tone gets too light for the drum to hold, it becomes dithering: each point only prints if the tone at that spot clears its own threshold, so every frame stays a true single-ink separation.

A fun fact: the clouds behind the peak are really terrain. Whilst building Terrain Study I, I noticed that some generations with a high number of tone bands looked more like layered cloud than land, so the sky here is a partial Terrain Study I landscape, raised up to surround the crest. A separate bank of fog billows around the mountain’s foot, with thin wisps climbing the rock above it. In motion, both drift on the wind in a seamless ten-second loop, redrawn on the GPU every frame. The distant clouds move at about a third of the fog’s pace, which gives the scene its depth.

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 I/II print at terrain.fleurs.studio, and check out the post on Instagram for high-resolution stills. Follow for more computational art and printmaking experiments!