Tooling around with ArcGIS and an Australia height map. This is a rough outline of Australia after a 200m sea level rise.

Geological map construction in a GIS

Ok, can create a basic geological map in Arcgis. This is an early simplified map I've produced of an area east of Dubbo, NSW, based on radiometric imagery and previous geological maps.

Peterson sessions

Working on Geo assignments of late, running Terragen renders in the background. The latest renders are taking upwards of 5 hours to coalesce as they invariably become more complex and include more and more variables. I have a system where I generate a low resolution render that takes 4-5mins, and if I'm happy with it I go on to generate a high resolution version.

I actually haven't done any Terragen research or reading for a while, I'm just trying to reach the limits of my current knowledge. This approach may soon have run its course and I am thinking its nearly time to add to my knowledge base. I'm a little hesitant about incorporating objects into my gens as I know they are going to be very processor intensive and significantly blow out render times, which are expanding anyway. At any rate, its the landscape and geological side of Terragening that most interests me. I find generating landscape analogies in this way insightful when thinking about real world geological and geographical systems. And some of the renders look cool too!

Some of the renders below use a green surface shader to imply "grass", I think that tends to work well for the most part anyway.

(Top 3) Mature sedimentary landscape with lake. Getting the strata and outcrop shader to look good has been a challenge. I've found that stacking a few of them adds some much needed randomness to the layering of sediments. As any landscape photographer will tell you, the best time of day to take photos is at sunrise or sunset. The contrast of light and shadow highlights the three dimensional qualities of any land form.
(Bottom 3) Glitching the settings to generate unusual landscapes, purely for aesthetic reasons.

Sulfur or lichen?

 Some highlights from a recent terragen. Experimenting with hostile atmospheres and sheared/distorted terrain. Pushing parameters to glitching point in order to explore the fuzzy edges of possible landscapes.

Dust and aerosol filled atmosphere with approaching solar terminator.

 

 Sulfur aerosols and sheared beds.

 

Highland terrain above cloud bank with either sulfur dusting or prolific growth of yellow lichen.

 

Animation of saved progress images. 

As the terragen evolved with tweaks to various parameters, a copy was saved and later compiled to create this GIF.

Back into the Terragen activity, here are some of the latest renders.

 Snow dusted uplifted sandstone blocks. Foggy valleys.

 Messing around with creating glitched landscapes by tweaking variables beyond intended limits. This warrants further investigation.

More sandstone blocks, uplifted and tilted.

A nice little interactive tool that illustrates sea level variability of the Australian and SE Asian coastlines over the past 100000 years. These variations were of course a result of the growth and decay of the vast northern hemisphere ice sheet. I would love to see climate and vegetation categories as well!

Water worlds

Article about a recently investigated planetary system with two potential water planets, both a little larger than Earth. Would be fascinating to find out the composition of the atmospheres and the thickness of the water layers for each body. How deep are the silicate portions of the planets and how massive are they? How has their distance from the parent star influenced the composition of these planets?