Generation of Folded Terrains from Simple Vector Maps

Elie Michel (1) , Arnaud Emilien (1, 2) , Marie-Paule Cani (1)

1 IMAGINE - Intuitive Modeling and Animation for Interactive Graphics & Narrative Environments
2 DIRO - Département d'Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle [Montreal]

While several terrain generation methods focused on plausible watersheds, the fact that most mountains should not be isolated but rather be part of wider scale mountain ranges was seldom considered. In this work, we present the first procedural method that generates folded terrains from simple user input, in the form of some sparse peak distribution on a vector map. The key idea is to infer possible continental plates from this distribution and to use simplified plate tectonics to generate relevant terrain folds. The resulting terrain with large-scale folds, computed in real-time, can be further refined using standard erosion simulation. This leads to detailed terrains with plausible mountain ranges that match the peak distributions and main rivers specified on simple vector maps.

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Analyse numérique [math.NA]

Elie Michel, Arnaud Emilien, Marie-Paule Cani. Generation of Folded Terrains from Simple Vector Maps. Eurographics 2015 short paper proceedings, May 2015, Zurich, Switzerland. pp.4. ⟨hal-01147920v1⟩