Large-Scale Physics-Based Terrain Editing Using Adaptive Tiles on the GPU

Digital content authoring, large-scale terrain, physics-based simulation, terrain editing, mip-map, hydraulic erosion, GPU.

In this article, we introduce a new interactive, intuitive, and accessible physics-based framework for digital terrain editing. Our solution is suitable for users involved in digital content authoring and does not assume any in-depth knowledge about physics-based simulations. Large terrains can be loaded from external sources, generated procedurally, or created manually, and they are edited at interactive framerates on the GPU. We introduce two simplifications that allow us to perform large scale editing. First, the terrain is divided into tiles of different resolutions according to the complexity of the underlying terrain. Second, each tile is stored as a mip-map texture and different levels of detail are used during the physics-based simulation depending on the dynamics of terrain changes. In comparison with nonadaptive computation, by using our approach we can achieve a 50% speedup with a simultaneous 25% savings of memory. Most important, we can process terrain sizes that were not possible to process with previous approaches.