Rivers of Processing

Check out my River Experiment. Coded in proessing, traces waterfall over an island to "find" rivers. The second phase of this expirement -- the 3D version -- is here. Note -- this openGL version can be quite taxing on your system!

There's a lot going on "under the hood" here:

• The terrain fractalizes as deep as you need it to be. The amount of variation is set by the starting resolution.
• There is a "raindrop simulator" that sends rain sliding down from the mountaintops. The rain erodes the terrain and sets the hydration at each point.
• The rivers sprout from the wettest "valleys" -- points that are lower than their neighbors and trap the largest number of raindrops.
• The trees map the spots that are crossed by the largest number of raindrops, and therefore have the highest hydration.
• The color map reflects the height of the terrain -- but the saturation is keyed to the hydration of the underlying terrain. If the trees are not mapped, you can "see" the wetness of the ground based on the saturation of the color.
• All of this happens on the client side. The applet that generates this terrain has a well-factored series of responsibility handlers. Changing color, resolution and other factors can be done easily by altering the java parameters.
• I hope to expose some  of these paramters to form fields in future versions.