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#isometric

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Karsten Schmidt

Undefined terrain (2010)

Early research sketches for an experimental, mapping/GIS-inspired UI prototype. The idea was to place different content pieces on an initially empty flat surface and then use traffic/access patterns to erode the space around each item, slowly forming a 2.5D terrain of valleys/canyons visualizing/revealing navigational usage patterns and creating a vast navigable space. My initial prototype (shown here) was for the terrain to be constructed from a pre-rendered set of isometric tiles with pre-baked ambient occlusion shadow maps (for which I wrote a custom AO renderer in Java). The thousands of tiles were loaded as a single PNG sprite sheet for in-browser canvas drawing (this was before WebGL)... Terrain erosion simulation was done dynamically via my toxiclibs simutils library (which I partially ported to JavaScript)...

(Later on I built a cloud-based tool to create better simulations, use #Sunflow with custom extensions to pre-render daily super high-resolution maps, slice results into thousands of map tiles/zoom levels and then use Google Maps API with a custom map layer to create the UI. Sadly the entire project was cancelled just before launch...

Screenshot of an isometric voxel tile-based terrain grayscale render of an eroded landscape with randomly scattered markers, each having an "undefined" tag and using color coding to indicate hypothetical grouping of content. Each tile has pre-baked ambient occlusion (shadow maps) and elevation has an inverse mapping to brightness (i.e. higher elevations are tinted darker). The max elevation layer has a repeating "b.pro" pattern embossed...
Screenshot of an isometric voxel tile-based terrain grayscale render of an eroded landscape with randomly scattered markers, each having an "undefined" tag and using color coding to indicate hypothetical grouping of content. Each tile has pre-baked ambient occlusion (shadow maps) and elevation has a direct mapping to brightness (i.e. higher elevations are lighter). The max elevation layer has a repeating "b.pro" pattern embossed...
Screenshot of a 20x20 grid of pre-rendered tiles, each with pre-baked ambient occlusion and using different color hues and tile/rode size to visualize elevation.
Screenshot of a grayscale (almost white and white) ambient occlusion render of a terrain consisting of multi-scale subdivided tiles of different elevations (based on a signed-distance field)
#Vintage#UI#Prototype
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