Click here for a larger image
The main thrust of my research at the time of this writing is the creation of a procedural fractal planet, as seen in "Gaea & Selene," which is well-defined everywhere and at all scales, with visual appearance and complexity similar to Earth's. The following three images are renderings of procedural landscapes with adaptive level of detail -- that is, the triangles tessellating the surface are adaptively sized so that they are about the width of a pixel on the screen, no matter how near or far they are from the eye. This is quite a trick to program, and I have to credit Craig Kolb and Matt Pharr for writing the programs which made these pictures possible. They are the most realistic images I have created.
This image appeared in the SIGGRAPH '93 Technical Slide Set.
Click here for a larger image
"Mordor" represents the my first test/artistic rendering of a terrain with adaptive level of detail. This image was rendered with Craig Kolb's original extension of Rayshade to include what we called "procedural height fields" or "phfs" for short. It's the same terrain model seen in "Slickrock I" above and on the planet Gaea at the end of the Gaea Zoom animation.
While this was never meant to be more than a test rendering, I like the way the strange lighting I chose makes the image invert in the image plane. (In case you were wondering, this is an image of mountains lit from the right by orange light, with deep blue shadows -- sometimes people have a hard time apprehending that at first!)
We thought this was pretty impressive when we rendered it at 4096 x 3276 resolution in 1991, with pixel-sized triangles throughout. Actually, I still think it is...
mk. 5
mk. 6
mk 8
What's really interesting about these three images and the one below are actually physically situated on the face of the planet Gaea (that's Selene you see in the background). The Gaea Zoom is a preliminary animation of a zoom from deep space to these mountains; the scenes here are merely carefully chosen and colored scenes from within those mountains. ("Slickrock II" appeared in the SIGGRAPH 95 Technical Slide Set.)
Note that all the colors we see in these images and in the next image arise from a single procedural texture which performs a fractal color modulation. The texture was created using the GIT matrix generator. By moving the terrain around in texture space, we get different colorations of the same scene. I like these three images as a tryptich, illustrating the different examples of beauty we can find by random exploration of such aesthetic spaces.
The Iris prints we've made of the Slickrock images are particularly beautiful. I'm pleased with the Slickrock series, as I feel that I've finally gained mastery in the use of color, of a level that I would dare to compare with a good painters'.
Click here for a larger image
Here we have an extreme close-up of the terrain on Gaea. The goal is to have the planet be this beautiful everywhere you go on it, and to bring it to real-time performance so that you may roam about interactively, in a VR (virtual reality) setting. That will take some years, but it will happen within ten years, I predict.
Click here for a larger image
This image is a snapshot taken from a random point near the surface of the planet Gaea, looking more or less towards the moon Selene. I think it's interesting in that it's the equivalent of an image sent back by a probe sent to image the planet, much like the images we have from the surfaces of Mars and Venus, reported by the probes we sent there. There are two principal differences between this image and the four immediately above: The color has not been as carefully modulated, and the composition has not been refined -- it appears exactly as imaged, using a random camera position (random in lateral position, not in altitude or view direction, to be precise). It is a precursor to those images; a test image made simply to verify that the planet existed and looked OK.
Last Change: October 28, 1995