Abstract

It can be difficult to quickly and easily create realistic sandstone terrain. Film makers often need to generate realistic terrain for establishing the setting of their film. Many methods have been created which address terrain generation. One such method is using heightmaps which encode height as a gray-value in a 2d image. Most terrain generation techniques don't admit concavities such as overhangs and arches. We present an algorithm that operates on a voxel grid for creating 3d terrain. Our algorithm uses curvature estimation to weather away the terrain. We speed up our method using a caching mechanism that stores the curvature estimate. We generate piles of colluvium, the broken away pieces of weathered rock, with a simple deposition algorithm to improve the realism of the terrain. We explore the possibility of generating our sandstone terrain on the GPU using OpenCL. With our algorithm, an artist is able to quickly and easily create 3d terrain with concavities and colluvium.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

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