Procedural Editing of Virtual Terrains Using 3D Bézier Curves

The process of manually shaping and adding features to virtual terrains is a time-consuming task prevalent during the development process of many applications, such as games and virtual simulators. We present a technique to shape virtual terrains by creating excavations and embankments to flatten and smooth the terrain along paths defined by composite cubic 3D Bezier curves. The curves are procedurally generated based on an input set of vertices. Our approach is capable of carving smooth paths on terrains for placement or rendering of roads, railways, rivers, or any other feature that follows a path. We employ spatial hashing and data structures to optimize execution on the GPU.