The Visual Computer

, Volume 30, Issue 9, pp 997–1007 | Cite as

Procedural approach to volumetric terrain generation

  • Aitor Santamaría-Ibirika
  • Xabier Cantero
  • Mikel Salazar
  • Jaime Devesa
  • Igor Santos
  • Sergio Huerta
  • Pablo G. Bringas
Original Article
First Online:

Abstract

The recent outbreak of indie games has popularized volumetric terrains to a new level, although video games have used them for decades. These terrains contain geological data, such as materials or cave systems. To improve the exploration experience and due to the large amount of data needed to construct volumetric terrains, industry uses procedural methods to generate them. However, they use their own methods, which are focused on their specific problem domains, lacking customization features. Besides, the evaluation of the procedural terrain generators remains an open issue in this field since no standard metrics have been established yet. In this paper, we propose a new approach to procedural volumetric terrains. It generates completely customizable volumetric terrains with layered materials and other features (e.g., mineral veins, underground caves, material mixtures and underground material flow). The method allows the designer to specify the characteristics of the terrain using intuitive parameters. Additionally, it uses a specific representation for the terrain based on stacked material structures, reducing memory requirements. To overcome the problem in the evaluation of the generators, we propose a new set of metrics for the generated content.

Keywords

Procedural generation Virtual worlds Volumetric terrain Terrain modeling 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Iván García-Ferreira for his support over the research process. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Aitor Santamaría-Ibirika
    • 1
  • Xabier Cantero
    • 1
  • Mikel Salazar
    • 1
  • Jaime Devesa
    • 1
  • Igor Santos
    • 1
  • Sergio Huerta
    • 1
  • Pablo G. Bringas
    • 1
  1. 1.University of DeustoBilbaoSpain

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