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Shan, Shui: Procedurally generated Chinese landscape painting

270 points| tomato2juice | 5 years ago |github.com | reply

39 comments

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[+] cossatot|5 years ago|reply
The author has a lot of interesting projects on his page: https://lingdong.works/ though I haven't checked all of them out (I have no desire to watch anyone's face decay).

As a geologist, I happen to think that all landscapes are procedurally generated, though it is in general a slower generation process than the computer simulations. Nonetheless I remain fascinated by both the Earth and computational representations of it, and I really enjoy looking at simulations and art depicting landscapes, envisioning what tectonic and erosional processes could have produced the scene.

[+] inetsee|5 years ago|reply
Thank you for posting this. I might not have discovered his other works page without your comment.

One odd thing happened as I was trying to see the software in action. When I clicked on the link to show the software in action https://lingdong-.github.io/shan-shui-inf/ I got a security warning from Firefox. The alternative link https://shan-shui-inf.glitch.me/ did not produce an error. I don't know why.

[+] sam1r|5 years ago|reply
Whoa! Author has amazing prior projects!
[+] zxcvbn4038|5 years ago|reply
Really awesome! Author has a sense of humor - saw a "Pizza Hut" buried deep in the mountains, see it in the code also. Wish there was some comments in the code.
[+] abathur|5 years ago|reply
I spotted a long-range electrical transmission tower in one.
[+] sneeuwpopsneeuw|5 years ago|reply
yhea i was also interested to sea how he did the outlining effect. I made something tile this once in OpenGL. But that took a lot of code to create. So yhea magic code with many magic numbers.
[+] dheera|5 years ago|reply
Would be awesome to get this on a wall inside an eInk display and a wooden frame. Kind of like a real watercolor painting but moving very slowly.
[+] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
I'd love to see if this could be implemented with parallax scrolling. Then it would make a great background for a procedural platformer type game.
[+] julianeon|5 years ago|reply
That's incredible.

I'm not a guy who gets mad at the inevitable, but I can't help but think the robots are coming for the visual artists and illustrators, fast.

Set your clock because this is 2020, and 2030 will look much different.

[+] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
The guy who made this IS the artist. Making that program took lots of creativity and aesthetic sense.
[+] codezero|5 years ago|reply
I think this is true for (at least) one reason: robots can iterate a lot faster. Content generation is a human bottleneck.
[+] nthnclrk|5 years ago|reply
This reminds of the Internet, particularly pre-social media, when it was interesting and people had personal sites and weird projects.
[+] maxwelljoslyn|5 years ago|reply
Take heart, nthnclrk. That side of the Web is not dead.

There are loads of people out there running wacky personal websites on every subject you can imagine. Mine[1], for instance, holds poetry, Chinese translations, a videogame, and an open call for Star Wars fan art.

If you want the real motherlode, go read Kicks Condor's "Href Hunt." [2] That drongo collects and catalogs people's personal websites, so you've got a whole evening of digital feasting ahead of you.

[1] https://www.maxwelljoslyn.com

[2] https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[+] tartoran|5 years ago|reply
The author has a vimeo page (https://vimeo.com/321658453#at=1)

And the first one, the doodle rig caught my attention. One draws a being, a skeleton is inferred and animation is also inferred. That’s pretty cool

[+] etaioinshrdlu|5 years ago|reply
I almost forgot you could generate images without neural nets!
[+] somishere|5 years ago|reply
Great project, especially the svg aspect! On a fairly wide aside, it also gave me major nostalgia hit for Tiki Tiki Tembo, a book I haven't thought about since it was read to me as a very young kid .. also apparently a great example of cultural appropriation and reinforced negative stereotypes in print (though I'd argue it also engendered a deep awe for Chinese culture in a lot of kids, myself included).
[+] mango7283|5 years ago|reply
Are those actually high tension power lines in the generated landscapes or are those supposed to represent a pagoda... ( Not sure if always appears but it's there in the one I generated...)
[+] serjester|5 years ago|reply
For a senior in college this is incredibly impressive!
[+] heyitsguay|5 years ago|reply
Amazing! I wonder if there is any space for performance optimizations to enable the initial scroll rate to continue indefinitely?
[+] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
Not sure, but the intuitive way to do this would be tiling, BUT since the generation is SVG, it would need overlapping tiles that are then rasterized and cropped to hide the line endings.
[+] beeforpork|5 years ago|reply
The translation of the name is likely:

{Mountain, Water}

[+] gus_massa|5 years ago|reply
Nice project.

It is strange that all the code is in index.html. I was expecting something like mountains.js, trees.js ...

It is also strange to see power towers in the drawings. Why did you add them? (I guess there s an interesting story in this detail.)

[+] madhadron|5 years ago|reply
> It is strange that all the code is in index.html. I was expecting something like mountains.js, trees.js ...

Why? It's about 4000 lines of JavaScript, which is manageable usable in any editor, and it makes it completely self contained. What would be gained by splitting it up into multiple files?

[+] jgwil2|5 years ago|reply
Agreed - very cool project that could use some refactoring.