Terrain Synthesis By-Example

Abstract

Synthesizing terrain or adding detail to terrains manually is a long and tedious process. With procedural synthesis methods this process is faster but more difficult to control. This paper presents a new technique of terrain synthesis that uses an existing terrain to synthesize new terrain. To do this we use multi-resolution analysis to extract the high-resolution details from existing models and apply them to increase the resolution of terrain. Our synthesized terrains are more heterogeneous than procedural results, are superior to terrains created by texture transfer, and retain the large-scale characteristics of the original terrain.

Planet Generation: Mimicking the Nature's Way

“…An example is an application by Zhou et al [7] where an user-sketched feature map is used together with a real DEM models to produce a realistically looking terrain that is formed by the user constraints. Synthesis of a new terrain using data from an existing one was also presented by Brosz et al [8] who uses multi-resolution analysis for this purpose. Another sketching approach was implemented by Gain et al [9] that allows easy sketching of a terrain silhouette and boundary curves that are later incorporated into the normal terrain generation.…”

A parametrically controlled terrain generation method

“…But they will consume an extreme long time to generate terrains. There are some methods generate terrains by making use of image processing and texture synthesis techniques [9][10][11][12]. These methods usually require an initial set of terrains or images which must be obtained from other process.…”

Evolution of artificial terrains for video games based on obstacles edge length

“…Pouderoux et al managed to obtain good approximations of down-sampled elevation data sets using radial basis functions [3]. Other methods use patches [6], small-scale [4] or microscopic [5] features of existing terrains to synthesize new ones that satisfy the user global constraints. Stachniak and Stuerzlinger presented a method that deforms an initial fractal terrain by applying local modifications to satisfy a set of various fixed constraints [7].…”

“…They focus on: surface approximations [2], [3], decomposition or re-composition [4], [5], [6] and deformation [7]. Vemuri et al generate a terrain model by computing the interpolation of point clouds or contour lines [2].…”