Curious Contours; procedural terrain generator ⛰️
This is a free web tool to create procedural terrain textures in real-time in the browser.
How this works: a bunch of 3D spheres (meta-balls) are drawn on the canvas. They float around and combine with others based on distance. Then, 2D cross-sections are drawn using a Marching Squares algorithm. This ends up producing a terrain contour aesthtetic.
Use the controls at the top-right to set animation speed, size, level of complexity, rotation, colours, and more.
Use the buttons at the bottom-right to randomize the output, and export as image or mp4 video.
This tool is completely free, open source (MIT license), without any paywalls or premium options. You are welcome to use it for personal or commercial purposes.
If you found this tool useful, feel free to buy me a coffee. My name is Alan, and I enjoy building open source software for art, animation, games, and more. This would be much appreciated during late-night coding sessions!
This project is coded using vanilla Javascript, HTML5 canvas, and CSS (see github repo).
If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in my other free / open source projects:
- Liquid Shape Distortions: psychedelic animations using webgl shaders
- Particular Drift: turn photos into flowing particle animations
- Liquid Logo: turn logos and icons into liquid metal animations
- Video-to-ASCII: turn videos into ASCII pixel art
- Shape Shimmer: turn photos into funky wave animations
- Colliding Scopes: turn photos into kaleidoscope animations
Feel free to reach out to discuss, give suggestions, or just to say hi! You can find me @stereo.drift on instagram, or through the other places below :)