Procedural Landscape Generator Script

One of the most common things made via procedural generation is landscapes.

I figured I would try my hand at it, seeing as it's not THAT complicated...
I'm also making this because there's this job I really want, and I figured this would be some good supplemental content alongside my resume.

I mean there's always the "Landscape" addon in Blender 3D that generates landscapes automatically, but I don't want that! I want to be able to do this myself!
Plus how useful would that be to be able to us with other stuff??

So I started by creating a simple script that did simply randomized the Z location of a plane's vertices. It looked something like this:

But that's not a landscape, that's a bed of nails, perhaps a bed of rocks. Nobody wants to live in that.

I then moved on to creating a script that subdivided and then randomized the vertices Z locations in iterations. Each iteration is x number of subdivisions with y sized random location, plus with each iteration, the randomness value of each Z vertice location depreciates. I initially got the math a little wrong, and although it was looking a little wavy like a landscape, it still looked like a bed of nails.

So after some repair, I finally created the Landscape Generator Script!
You can change size of the mesh, the number of iterations, the height of the randomness, the depreciation value of the randomness, initial smoothing after each iteration (courtesy of the subdivide tool.), and the random seed.

Now it looks WAY more like a landscape! I'll add a feature that allows me to control plateaus, sea level, and perhaps something that'll smooth the edges of the mesh out a bit, as if to create an island, but for now, this will do.

I will add that you can still make your landscapes look ridiculous. Here's some generated with uselessly out-of-scope values:

SUPER MOUNTAIN RANGE!!

I think it actually looks really nice...

To use simply copy/paste the following lines into your python interpreter:

from random import *

def landscapemake(size,sigma,iterations,antiintensity,cuts_per_it,smooth=1,ranseed=2):

    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_plane_add(radius=size/2)

    seed(ranseed)

    for it in range(iterations):

        bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')        #throw mesh in editmode and subdivide.

        bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide(number_cuts=cuts_per_it,smoothness=smooth,fractal=0)

        bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT') 

        for vertex in bpy.context.object.data.vertices:     #Here we modify the verts themselves.

            intense_mod = (antiintensity/iterations)*it  #This is to control sigma over time.

            itcopy = (it*intense_mod)+1     #This decreases sigma over time and avoids /ing by 0.

            height = gauss(0,sigma/itcopy)

            vertex.co.z += height

And then use the following line to execute the script:

landscapemake(10,.4,4,5,2,1,2)

To explain what those values are:

landscapemake(Size,
    SigmaHeight,
    NumberofIterations, 
    IntensityReduction,
    SubdivisionsPerIteration,
    Smooth,
    RandomSeed)

At this point, you pretty much just need to enjoy it. There's not much to it. It was also an incredibly simple script to create!

I'll create a tutorial in time. For now, just enjoy this thing and stay tuned!!

Download Script Here