from Hacker News

Shan, Shui: Procedurally generated Chinese landscape painting

by tomato2juice on 6/9/20, 6:25 PM with 39 comments

  • by cossatot on 6/9/20, 9:40 PM

    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.

  • by zxcvbn4038 on 6/9/20, 9:54 PM

    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.
  • by dheera on 6/10/20, 12:54 AM

    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.
  • by CGamesPlay on 6/10/20, 2:03 AM

    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.
  • by julianeon on 6/10/20, 12:29 AM

    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.

  • by nthnclrk on 6/9/20, 11:27 PM

    This reminds of the Internet, particularly pre-social media, when it was interesting and people had personal sites and weird projects.
  • by tartoran on 6/9/20, 11:54 PM

    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

  • by etaioinshrdlu on 6/10/20, 12:24 AM

    I almost forgot you could generate images without neural nets!
  • by somishere on 6/10/20, 12:40 AM

    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).
  • by eatbitseveryday on 6/9/20, 10:12 PM

    This would be pretty sweet if it could encode a few "hidden" objects, like a "Where's Waldo" type of image, but maybe with "Where's Xi" or "Where's the Emperor". Then one could generate a large set of new content which would also be fun to comb through as a game.
  • by mango7283 on 6/10/20, 12:53 AM

    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...)
  • by serjester on 6/9/20, 10:28 PM

    For a senior in college this is incredibly impressive!
  • by heyitsguay on 6/9/20, 11:33 PM

    Amazing! I wonder if there is any space for performance optimizations to enable the initial scroll rate to continue indefinitely?
  • by gaoryrt on 6/11/20, 3:47 AM

  • by beeforpork on 6/10/20, 6:49 AM

    The translation of the name is likely:

    {Mountain, Water}

  • by gus_massa on 6/9/20, 6:38 PM

    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.)