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Kiama

AI-Generated Heightmaps

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Today I noticed that the 1.5 checkpoint of Stable Diffusion was out and it was time to play with it again. It occurred to me to try heightmaps.

 

Most of the time I got 3d maps, which weren't useful in spite of being pretty:

 

1CV14r9.png

 

I found that I was getting quite decent results when I left out keywords that would change it to grayscale:

 

7G4zYlS.png

 

But of course I needed it to be grayscale.

 

Then I thought about ways to salvage these images. I tried using this one:

 

zzWskl7.png

 

I loaded it up into GIMP and I:

 

1. Reduced saturation to zero (turns into grayscale)
2. Inverted colors so that lighter is higher

3. Resized it to 1024x1024 (would need to be whatever size the map will be)
4. Gaussian blurred it to smooth it out
5. Fixed the edges with a soft black brush
6. Saved as 16-bit grayscale

 

And this was the result:

 

QvPKLRi.png

 

All those steps were very straightforward and didn't require any careful thought.

 

I put this into Wurm Generator FX:

 

uwOE6qu.png

 

I didn't spend much time on this but I believe it is a solid proof of concept.

 

If you want to try generating height maps, you can use Stable Diffusion either on your own pc (if you know how to code in python and have an NVIDIA graphics card) or on one of the sites that offer free daily credits, such as nightcafe.studio.

 

All Stable Diffusion requires as an input is words. So for example, the prompts I used were:

 

heightmap continents grayscale

heightmap fantasy continents grayscale

heightmap fantasy island 16-bit grayscale

heightmap, fantasy continent, 16-bit grayscale

tangram heightmap, fantasy island continent, black and white

 

Every prompt will create something different (and even the same prompt will create something different if you use a different seed, but changing the prompt is more likely to change the structure of the image).

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