A Fractal Model of Mountains with Rivers

Abstract

This paper addresses the long-standing problem of generating fractal mountains with rivers, and presents a partial solution that incorporates a squig-curve model of a river's course into the midpoint-displacement model for mountains. The method is based on the observation that both models can be expressed by similar context-sensitive rewriting mechanisms. As a result, a mountain landscape with a river can be generated using a single integrated process.

Keywords: modeling of natural phenomena, terrain models, midpoint displacement, squig curve, context-sensitive geometric rewriting.

Reference

Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Mark Hammel. A Fractal Model of Mountains with Rivers. In Proceeding of Graphics Interface '93, pages 174-180, May 1993. Held in Toronto, Ontario, 19-21 May 1993.