FilterHN

Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

126 points

by runevision

1 day ago

| past

| 10 comments

| blog.runevision.com

| HN

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runevision

1 day ago

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The blog post and the companion video (and shader source code) explain an erosion technique which emulates gorgeous branching gullies and ridges without simulation, while still allowing every point to be evaluated in isolation, which means it’s fast, GPU-friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks.

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have_faith

8 hours ago

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The video was really well done, very interesting even though I’m not very familiar with the subject. Is this the sort of thing that would go into a game like No Man’s Sky to improve the planet generation?

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lynnharry

5 hours ago

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In my opinion, any game featuring large-scale, realistic terrain would benefit from a tool like this. You simply can't hand-craft every ridge on a mountain range at that scale. Unless you're recreating a real-world location using satellite and LIDAR height data, procedural filters are the only way to achieve that level of geological detail efficiently.

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jadbox

8 hours ago

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very cool!

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spartanatreyu

7 hours ago

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You can play with the interactive example here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/sf23W1

Click and drag your mouse around the preview to see how fast it runs

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pixl97

3 hours ago

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I enjoyed Dwarf Fortress random map generation because it simulated erosion pretty well. Small creeks started in the mountains and flowed to the ocean getting larger as it went. Deep valleys and waterfalls too in places made for interesting maps.

Be interesting if we can start getting 3D games with random maps that are realistically generated and have interesting features in the future.

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catapart

8 hours ago

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Truly fantastic work! "Holy Grail" is right! Terrain generation just got an upgrade so the tooling is about to start producing some really beautiful results in real time. That's going to be a blast to work with. Thanks!

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davidanekstein

4 hours ago

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Thank you for writing this up, it was great to see all of the comparisons. Very well put together!

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p1necone

7 hours ago

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Being able to process separate chunks in parallel is the killer feature for any procgen algorithm - nice.

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brcmthrowaway

5 hours ago

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Any remember the 90s software Terragen and Vue3d?

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bananaboy

6 hours ago

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Amazing work!

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renewiltord

5 hours ago

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Great write-up. Results are quite stunning.

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nullc

5 hours ago

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might be fun to try to find parameters that agree well with the statistics of hi res lidar data, perhaps conditioned on geological maps. E.g. describe a geological history with layers of different formations and a pattern of uplift, and get a terrain which agrees with it statistically.

Without simulating erosion you're not going to get a faithful recreation of any particular geological history, but you could get something that looked consistent by virtue of being consistent with the statistics of that topography.