A Real-Time Sculpting and Terrain Generation System for Interactive Content Creation

Abstract

Volumetric representation is widely used in digital sculpting and terrain generation due to its highly modifiable characteristic. However, storing the entire raw voxel map requires a lot of memory, which limits its application on general machines. In this work, we propose to use a novel data structure based on the concept of layered depth-normal images to replace the commonly used scalar field for storing the volumetric information. The proposed data structure can be quickly edited, and the isosurface can be extracted by using general methods such as Marching Cubes and Dual Contouring. The proposed sculpting system can edit models with multiple resolution levels, and the surface between models of different resolutions can be connected seamlessly. Our method can achieve similar results as the existing volumetric methods while significantly reduces the memory usage and computation time. The model created by our system can be used in common game engines to make highly interactive games. Furthermore, all of our processes are parallel-friendly. We implemented a virtual reality digital content creation tool based on the proposed method to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our method.