Terrain Synthesis: an Interactive Approach

In this paper, we propose an interactive approach to synthesize macroscopic terrain using real terrain elevation data effectively and realistically. Users construct terrain primitives in the interactive environment by specifying terrain microscopic features. The features are then used to obtain a real terrain unit, one of the best matched terrain units, from terrain unit database where all units are segmented from terrain elevation maps of real world. Each matched terrain unit is then oriented and/or translated to substitute its corresponding terrain primitive for synthesizing macroscopic terrain. As experimental results show, the resultant synthesized terrain is realistic and reasonable, and fits to users’ intuition.