Procedural Reproduction of Terrain Textures with Geographic Data

Surface textures of high resolution and quality, either acquired from aerial or satellite imagery or computed using procedural models, are crucial for photorealistic terrain rendering. Procedural models provide a compact representation and can be evaluated at run-time. In this paper we present an extension to an existing, GPU-friendly procedural texturing model, such that it can be fitted semiautomatically to real-world data. In order to increase realism and to account for geographic conditions, we also include temperature, solar radiation and rainfall distributions ‐ simulated or modeled using measured data from gaging stations ‐ into the reproduction process. The original surface texture is no longer required for rendering: instead a new texture of arbitrary resolution is synthesized at runtime. In addition to the compact procedural model we store elevation data, anyway required for the terrain rendering, and low-resolution geographic data. We show results of our method applied to a comparatively little cultivated region in Central Asia.