Fast Hydraulic and Thermal Erosion on GPU

Abstract

Computer games, TV series, movies, simulators, and many other computer graphics applications use external scenes where a realistic looking terrain is a vital part of the view. Creating such terrains is a challenging task. In this paper we propose a method that generates realistic virtual terrains by simulation of hydraulic and thermal erosion on a predefined height field terrain. The model is designed to be executed interactively on parallel architectures like graphics processors.