Unerosion: Simulating Terrain Evolution Back in Time
Authors: 
Zhanyu Yang, Guillaume Cordonnier, Marie-Paule Cani, Christian Perrenoud, 
Bedrich BenesAuthors Info & Claims
Zhanyu Yang, Guillaume Cordonnier, Marie-Paule Cani, Christian Perrenoud, Bedrich BenesAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 1 - 12
Abstract
While the past of terrain cannot be known precisely because an effect can result from many different causes, exploring these possible pasts opens the way to numerous applications ranging from movies and games to paleogeography. We introduce unerosion, an attempt to recover plausible past topographies from an input terrain represented as a height field. Our solution relies on novel algorithms for the backward simulation of different processes: fluvial erosion, sedimentation, and thermal erosion. This is achieved by re-formulating the equations of erosion and sedimentation so that they can be simulated back in time. These algorithms can be combined to account for a succession of climate changes backward in time, while the possible ambiguities provide editing options to the user. Results show that our solution can approximately reverse different types of erosion while enabling users to explore a variety of alternative pasts. Using a chronology of climatic periods to inform us about the main erosion phenomena, we also went back in time using real measured terrain data. We checked the consistency with geological findings, namely the height of river beds hundreds of thousands of years ago.
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Index Terms
- Unerosion: Simulating Terrain Evolution Back in Time
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Published In
August 2024
276 pages
- Conference Co-chairs:
- Paul Kry,
- Marie-Paule Cani,
- Program Co-chairs:
- Melina Skouras,
- He Wang
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- EUROGRAPHICS: The European Association for Computer Graphics
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Eurographics Association
Goslar, Germany
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Published: 18 September 2024
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SCA '24: ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation
August 21 - 23, 2024
Quebec, Montreal, Canada
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