Visual Simulation of Erosion Terrain Considering Different Materials

Abstract

Research on methods for representing natural objects and phenomena by computer graphics (CG) has been steadily broadening the scope of represented objects. In expressing the natural landscape by CG, the topography is one of the important research subjects as a basic landscape component. Authoring virtual terrains presents a challenge and there is a strong need for authoring tools able to create realistic terrains. In this research, we propose a method to define an initial terrain model and perform erosion simulation. A general topographic shape generation method is a surface with undulations from information of height stored in two-dimensional array data called height field. However, with this data structure it is difficult to express the weathering structure called Toppling failure and the terrain such as the cliffs and caverns made by erosion due to the intense erosion of the waves. On the other hand, although volume data can define the internal structure of an object, defining and processing all of the large terrain with volume data has a problem of increasing the size of the data. In this method, we simulate the erosion process of terrain by combining terrain data generated from height field and volume data storing concentration value.