A Beginners Guide to Procedural Terrain Modelling Techniques

Abstract

Creating content for games manually is very time consuming & labor-intensive work. With the constant evolution in hardware technology, it is difficult to cope up with the high levels of visual fidelity and performance that is expected of this medium. Procedural Content Generation is a very good alternative to manual content creation but still has seen very limited usage. Common drawbacks of this process are the lack of control over the output & and the absence of a unifying modeling framework to make use of these techniques, although more recent research has been aimed towards tackling this problem. This paper surveys the various properties of procedural terrain modeling techniques (which are: Random Number Generator, Perlin Noise, Voronoi Tessellation and Midpoint Displacement), assess the authenticity of the output and the control a user can exert over the procedure.