Physically based hydraulic erosion simulation on graphics processing unit

Visual simulation of natural erosion on terrains has always been a fascinating research topic in the field of computer graphics. While there are many algorithms already developed to improve the visual quality of terrain, the recent simulation methods revolve around physically-based hydraulic erosion because it can generate realistic natural-looking terrains. However, many of such algorithms were tested only on low resolution terrains. When simulated on a higher resolution terrain, most of the current algorithms become computationally expensive. This is why in many applications today, terrains are generated off-line and loaded during the application runtime. This method restricts the number of terrains which can be stored if there is a limitation on storage capacity. Recently, graphics hardware has evolved into an indispensable tool in improving the speed of computation. This has motivated us to develop an erosion algorithm to map to graphics hardware for faster terrain generation. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient hydraulic erosion procedural technique that utilizes the GPUs powerful computation capability in order to generate high resolution erosion on terrains. Our method is based on the Newtonian physics approach that is implemented on a two-dimensional data structure which stores height fields, water amount, and dissolved sediment and water velocities. We also present a comprehensive comparison between the CPU and GPU implementations together with the visual results and the statistics on simulation time taken.