An erosion model based on velocity fields for the visual simulation of mountain scenery

Visual simulation of natural scenery using computer graphics is an interesting research field with wide applications such as flight simulation and special effects in movies. There have been many studies of fractal techniques that use 1/f noise generated by FFT or the midpoint displacement method as modelling methods for imaginary mountain scenery. These methods are suitable for creating impressive mountain scenes, but they cannot create clear ridge and valley lines, which are notable features of mountains produced by erosion processes. Although a few reports have presented modelling methods that take erosion processes into account, the results have not been satisfactory. In this paper we present a simple ‘quasi-physically based’ method for simulating the topography of eroded mountains based on velocity fields of water flow.  1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.