How I got started with 3d mountains

[rethread]

I saw theres a mandebrot function here to get people started with the psychadelic 2d stuff,  so i might as well put my method for making lava mountains here, and it gets you started into amazing organic terrain generation,  theres lots of stuff on youtube.   

they look really good, and they go really realtime quick with a gpu!  (a bit disturbingly quick.)

Excuse for a silly urge to go say what everyone already knows already ->
This fractal raytracing is totally the superpower!
because a) YOU GET TONNES OF DETAIL!!!
             b) theres no FOOTPRINT except the equation!!!
             c) The equation can make a lot of very beautiful strange things.  (as everyone here would know.)
             d) your mountain has a true xyz unchanging topology, just like the mandelbrot, just off one little equation. (or sampling function in this case.)
             e) the visualization code runs very well even on really old computers,  but the hyper threading opengl stuff kicks another level on top of it!
                 so they look potentially really amazing.
             f)  tv killed the radio star....     but once everyones on tv no-one is any more dif....


So give yourself a fullscreen quad, made from 2 triangles,  and in the pixel shader,  you access a 16x16 noise texture at different octaves (a small texture fits in the gpu cache better and goes alot quicker.), for the height level.

The thing is,  how do you make it 3d?

Well, its pretty simple,  one thing you can do,  is just perturb the y with the height after accessing the noise map for the series octaves,   and youll get an isometric mountain.      more advanced techniques use raymarching and raytracing, but they dont go as quick.




Anyone else would like to add anything?  im sure theres some other experts here.