Self-organized approach to modeling hydraulic erosion features

A simulation of the effects of hydraulic erosion should generate realistic fractal character and exhibit certain high-level behavior, such as tributary capture. Our simulation method is able to achieve these goals in an emergent way by using a variant of avalanching, which is a principle followed by many physical self-organized systems. We also use the same approach to generate initial conditions for the erosion, so that the combined algorithm is a complete terrain modeling method based only on self-organization.

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► We contribute erosion models to be used for procedural modeling of terrains.
► Our coastline model creates coastlines with varying roughness and mixed behavior.
► Our hydraulic model creates channels that link up, widen, and flood lakes.
► Our simulations combine into a terrain modeling technique.
► We contribute our avalanching modeling paradigm that unifies our simulations.