Fast hydraulic erosion simulation and visualization on gpu

Figure 1. Illustration of our erosion simulation on a ”PG”-shaped mountain. (a) The initial terrain. (b) Terrain is being eroded by rainfall. The dissolved soil (denoted by green color) is transported by the water flow (blue). (c) The eroded terrain and the deposited sediment (red) after the rainfall and during the evaporation. Natural mountains and valleys are gradually eroded by rainfall and river flows. Physically-based modeling of this complex phenomenon is a major concern in producing re-alistic synthesized terrains. However, despite some recent improvements, existing algorithms are still computationally expensive, leading to a time-consuming process fairly im-practical for terrain designers and 3D artists. In this paper, we present a new method to model the hy-draulic erosion phenomenon which runs at interactive rates on today’s computers. The method is based on the velocity field of the running water, which is created with an efficient shallow-water fluid model. The velocity field is used to cal-culate the erosion and deposition process, and the sediment transportation process. The method has been carefully de-signed to be implemented totally on GPU, and thus takes full advantage of the parallelism of current graphics hard-ware. Results from experiments demonstrate that the pro-posed method is effective and efficient. It can create realis-tic erosion effects by rainfall and river flows, and produce fast simulation results for terrains with large sizes. 1