Fit An Entire Planet In 90k

missingmatterboy points out this "interview with Dr. Ken "Doc Mojo" Musgrave, a computer graphics pioneer who worked with Benoit Mandelbrot generating fractal landscapes and who's designed custom shaders for Hollywood movies. His latest project is called MojoWorld and it uses the power of math to generate infinite-resolution fractal landscapes? one entire planet at a time. It's going to have an open SDK and, to top it all off, a Linux version is also in the works." This is a fascinating project.

Comments

/.ed already!

[merlin_jim]

Here's the Google cached copy (which isn't doing much better)

If you have to see the images, BryceWorld got a beta release and posted a gallery of images online.

And if you want to download it immediately to start playing with it, you can do it by filling out this questionairre

Old news...

[chronos2266]

This has been done quite a few times by quite a few people. Fractal planet 3d engines show up all the time at www.flipcode.com

I've seen some with complete weather and day/night cycles. Some really inspiring stuff.

Re:Old news...

[malducin]

Well the thing is Ken Musgrave is one of the pioneers, if anything a lot of people that have posted code like this out there are based on Ken's numerous papers. He was a researcher with Mandelbrot, kinda developed "multifractals", given SIGGRAPH courses about terrain and procedural modeling, and has written several chapters for a great book "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural; Approach". He also worked for a time for or at Digital Domain, doing code a for the moon on Apollo 13, and procedural smoke for Dante's Peak (not used) and Titanic.

Here is his webpage:

Ken Musgrave's website

Saw Mojoworld briefly at SIGGRAPH and it looked neat.

Marginal

[debrain]

Not really that impressive :) (tongue in cheek). I worked on the preliminary part of a massive multiplayer online game whose universe was a fractal, containing data right down to the shape and size of trees at every point on the planet. The interesting thing was that the modeled universe took time as a variable, and it evolved gradually with small increments of time, thus the universe (which was ultimately nearly infinite from the human perspective), right now was not the same as the universe yesterday, but very similar so those places / things you've become familiar with are still present, but have evolved slightly.

Planets would move, trees would grow, forests and deserts would change shape, oceans would rise and recede, etc. (Taking into account that the planet is of the type to support something like forests and oceans). The variables that define a "place" as a human looking onto the universe were coordinates and time, and a perspective (direction/angle) from which to project back information. Yet the visual perspective was only minor compared to the actual number of calculable variables, like temperature, and the like. Of course, strange things like density has to be accounted for with Newtonian physics, but that was ironically easy. Choosing what was the cause (is temperature random, ie. fractalish, or a product of Newtonian; really it's a combination; random in a Newtonian'ish thermodynamic space, but random only because we wouldn't actually want to calculate that sort of thing) and what was an effect was the hard part.

It is an interesting premise, isn't it? Taking a mathematical curiosity (the fractal) and doing something useful with it like creating a universe, or planet in this case. Somewhat matrix'ish.

Don't tell Slartibartfast....

[jgerman]

...he took real pride in his fjords, he wouldn't take too kindly to auto planet creation.

Looks quite cool, but not photorealistic

[RNG]

I've just checked out the sample mojo-world gallery (I'm a sucker for any web pages that claims to show me (almost) photo-realistic rendered terrain images) and while the output is quite cool, it still has ways to go before it's going to be photorealistic. On the other hand, the point of MojoWorld is that you don't need a lot of data to re-create your scenes: you just save the seed parameters (which are tiny as compared to a real height-field) and the engine re-creates the scene from these parameters.

I have been working on terraform (which is aimed more at the generation and manipulation of digial terrain rather than the rendering of it) for a while now and in the course of doing so have learned a few things about fractal terrain generation. The fact that you can regenerate the terrain from a few seed parameters is not that special (dimension, scale factor, random seed, etc); these are the kind of parameters that are typically passed to these functions anyways. The more interesting thing (to me) is that they have apparently found a compact representation of all the data needed to create a (semi)realistic scene from it. All in all, I think this is quite cool. Hopefully they (at some point) will write a white paper detailing some of the algorithms used by the (closed source) generator.

Just have to wonder...

[merlin_jim]

I just wonder how big their problem space is, and does it conform to the genetic algorithm definition of "smooth"... the existance of sliders would seem to indicate that this is so.

Smooth may be defined as:

• function: all genotypes code for valid phenotypes
• injective (compact, nonredundant): different genotypes lead to different phenotypes
• surjective (universal): all phenotypes are representable
• continuous: small variations in the genotype produce small variations in the phenotype
• inversely continuous: small variations in the phenotype can be induced by small variations in the genotype

Where genotype refers to the parameters and phenotype to the representation of the world.

If this were true, then one could theoretically evolve (using GA techniques) a planet that is a reasonable facsimile of earth, or any other feature set. Want a detailed map of San Francisco Bay? Let me squirt my survey through my Genetic Algorithm MojoWorld Compression Algorithm. Oh good, it's done. Use these five numbers to recreate the map...

Hmmm... sounds like it's plausible, but I don't think that small changes in the genotype necessarily result in small changes in the phenotype.