RiverLand: An Efficient Procedural Modeling System for Creating Realistic-Looking Terrains

Generating realistic-looking but interesting terrains quickly is a great challenge. We present RiverLand, an efficient system for terrain synthesis. RiverLand creates a realistic-looking terrain by first generating river networks over the land. Then, the terrain is created to be consistent with the river networks. In this way, the terrains created have a proper drainage basin, an important feature lacking in many existing procedural terrain methods. The terrains generated by RiverLand are also widely varied, with rolling hills, river valleys, alpine mountains, and rocky cliffs, all seamlessly connected in the same terrain. Since RiverLand does not use complex fluid simulations, it is fast, and yet is able to produce many of the erosion features generated by the simulation methods.