Layered data representation for visual simulation of terrain erosion

Abstract

New data structure for visual simulation of 3D terrains is introduced. The representation is inspired by real geological measurements and presents good trade-off between commonly used inexpensive, but inaccurate, height fields and memory demanding voxel representation. The representation is based on horizontal stratified layers consisting of one material. The layers are captured in certain positions of the landscape. This representation is then discretized into a 2D array. We demonstrate that the classical algorithm simulating thermal erosion (F.K. Musgrave, 1989), can run on this representation and we can even simulate some new properties. The simulation has been done on artificial data as well as on real data from Mars.