Procedural Terrain Generation
Creating terrain-like surfaces and simulating naturally occurring erosion processes by wind, water and temperature
Project presented and published at the International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications: VS-Games 2015, in Skövde, Sweden; featured on IEEE
Terrain formation
The initial shape of the terrain is created using fractal algorithms such as the Diamond-Square and Perlin noise, which can further be smoothed out using blurring algorithms like the Gaussian Blur, and low-pass filters to eliminate sharp peaks.
Thermal erosion
Simulating changes in temperature that dry the earth, causing it to crumble and slide down hills. This naturally-occuring phenomenon creates sharp peaks on tops on mountains and sandy dune formations in valleys.
Hydraulic erosion
Rain droplets are created at random points on the terrain map, and simulated using a realistic fluid simulation. Each cell has 'pipes' connecting it to neighbouring cells, that try to keep the pressure between the cells balanced, taking into account the force of gravity. This naturally leads to waves forming on the surface of the water mesh. Furthermore, each cell has the capacity to dissolve and pass on the terrain, which leads to rivers and valleys forming.
Wind forces over the hydraulic erosion
A genuine implementation of wind forces over the water that erodes the ground is presented, which also helped actually publish a paper on this project. The wind force is driving the fluid simulation in arbitrary directions, while also taking into account the slopes of the terrain, so that the ones facing the wind directly are more strongly influenced.