Procedural generation of 3D karst caves with speleothems

Abstract

A comprehensive method for generating natural looking virtual karst caves is presented. The method includes the network and the local shape of cave passages, the appearance of the wall surface, and speleothems like stalactites. It favors efficient explicit phenomenological modeling over detailed physical modeling and simulation of the long-lasting real process of cave formation, which would be impractical. Speleothems are placed considering the suitability of local conditions of the environment. Appropriately designed grid-based data structures efficiently handle the challenge of different scales of caves. An implementation of the method is used to experimentally demonstrate that virtual karst caves of the major real-world types can be generated with practicable computing time and memory requirements as well as interactively visualized and walked through.