Modeling landscapes with ridges and rivers

Abstract

We present a new fractal based method of generating realistic models of natural landscapes. In this paper, we describe a three-steps method that produces a terrain mesh using ridge lines and rivers drainage network. As opposed to previous methods that compute water erosion for a given terrain model --- Digital Elevation Map ---, our terrain mesh is generated constrained by a precomputed set of ridge lines and rivers network. A skeleton of a ridges and rivers network is computed and stored in a Digital Elevation Map (D.E.M.) as initial values. Then, the elevations data set is enriched using a novel interpolation method based on a Midpoint Displacement's Inverse process. Finally, a midpoint displacement subdivision is applied to interpolate the remaining elevation coordinates. The resulting terrain meshes lead to naturalistic landscape models and our method seems to be very promising. Images produced by our model are presented.