Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion
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Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
At large scale, landscapes result from the combination of two major processes: tectonics which generate the main relief through crust uplift, and weather which accounts for erosion. This paper presents the first method in computer graphics that combines uplift and hydraulic erosion to generate visually plausible terrains. Given a user-painted uplift map, we generate a stream graph over the entire domain embedding elevation information and stream flow. Our approach relies on the stream power equation introduced in geology for hydraulic erosion. By combining crust uplift and stream power erosion we generate large realistic terrains at a low computational cost. Finally, we convert this graph into a digital elevation model by blending landform feature kernels whose parameters are derived from the information in the graph. Our method gives high-level control over the large scale dendritic structures of the resulting river networks, watersheds, and mountains ridges.
Description
@article{10.1111:cgf.12820,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion}},
author = {Cordonnier, Guillaume and Braun, Jean and Cani, Marie-Paule and Benes, Bedrich and Galin, Éric and Peytavie, Adrien and Guérin, Éric},
year = {2016},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.12820}
}