Mont Rouen

Relatively few people have noticed that many -- for a time, even most -- of my landscape renderings have been of the same mountain and bay. I suppose I can invoke Monet for precedence in rendering the same thing again and again and again, but the fact is, it's just a lot of work to explore the random landscapes a fractal terrain generator will give you, looking for an interesting one and setting up a nice visual composition for a picture. As I've generally more interested in creating new visual effects than new shapes, the same scene has served me well over the years.

I think the variety of visual moods I've captured with this one mountain is interesting in itself. But you be the judge.

(Note that this mini-gallery is not exhaustive -- you'll see other renderings of this same scene in other parts of this web document.)

Nimbus (1987)

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"Nimbus" is my first fractal landscape. I had made a rainbow -- Prisms and Rainbows: A Dispersion Model for Computer Graphics -- for my then-recent Masters degree in computer graphics, so I included it in this first landscape. Note the large triangles tessellating the terrain -- this was before I developed a faster way of ray tracing height fields. (The grid tracing algorithm -- Grid Tracing: Fast Ray Tracing for Height Fields -- is the slowest but most memory-efficient of the published specialized height field ray tracing algorithms.)