A good while ago I stumbled across this video on youtube about a theory that the earth grew in size and the tectonic plates 'float' on top of this expanding sphere.

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Now despite this being somewhat scientifically questionable it did get me thinking that it might be fun to model a procedurally generated world using this technique. Typical procedural generation techniques using perlin noise or similar often lead to quite random looking continents:


(Apologies if these are your images and you don't like me referencing them!)

This approach can get good results, but it's easy to just get noisy terrains.

Leveraging the 'expanding' earth idea I'm going to build a model for fun where a verlet cloth sits on an expanding sphere. The cloth will become the terrain of the planet and I'll see if I can get it to 'rip' in nice ways as the sphere expands.

One approach I'll try is to randomly assign each of the points on the cloth parameters such as mass or friction, and randomly assign the strength the links have to adjacent points. When the stress on the links reaches a critical point they can 'rip' free. The remaining cloth can be considered land and the rest sea.

Another approach could be to 'inject' cloth into the stress points as the sphere grows, and allow the cloth to exist with a height on top of the sphere, allowing wrinkles as material builds up. Then a sea level can be chosen and the coast lines would be a result of that.

I think it's an interesting idea, I'll post pictures of any results I may come up with. If nothing else perhaps it will give others a new idea to play with too