Hydraulic Erosion: A Survey

Terrain morphology has been on the radar of Computer Graphics for more than twenty years and various techniques for its modeling have been presented. These approaches range from fractal and multifractal surface generation to physically-based models of erosion and weathering. From all the weathering phenomena that can be observed in Nature, the hydraulic erosion has the major visual importance. We will focus on hydraulic erosion in our presentation and we will describe various techniques which enhance this important clue to the realistic terrain model generation. Models of a cellular automata-based weathering will be described, techniques simulating soil transportation in liquid, aging, and a generalized solution to modeling hydraulic erosion using ideas from fluid mechanics will be shown. The simulations show the terrain morphogenesis and can be used for animations as well as for static scene models generation. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation – Display algorithms— [I.3.7]: Computer Graphics—Three Dimensional Graphics and Realism – Virtual Reality