In my work (robotic space missions) the need to create synthetic terrain often comes up, e.g of moons you might want to land on or drive on. Best info on that seems to come from the game development community. I was hoping it might be covered here... there's some relevant info, but generating a landscape from scratch using terrain primitives etc. isn't. Someone should write that book...
I have batted around the idea of realistic terrain explorations with a few friends and have a bookmark folder of potentially useful links if we ever decided to actually do something about it. Which is to say, I'm not at all a good resource, just someone vaguely interested from the outside.
Have you looked at Gaea? There is a community version and it seems like it could be useful for exactly what you describe. https://quadspinner.com/
It's kinda funny to see this comment - I just sent a long email to someone about simulating terrains/granular materials in the context of robotic space missions and logged in to hackernews only to see this.
I'm curious what libraries you've come across from the game dev community that are useful. My usecase requires photo realism, consistent granular interaction, appropriate force response on contact with say a robotic arm. I've been checking out different tools and project Chrono seems to be the most accurate but also the most computationally expensive. I'm looking for something near real-time and haven't been able to find any - NVIDIA Isaac is meh and there's a new library called GranularGym that seems to be only written for a conference and never updated after that. Would love to get your thoughts/suggestions!
For the curious this is about modeling existing terrain, not about generating synthetic terrain. That said once you have some synthetic terrain, this work may help get some interesting insight into it, notably the runoff models.
What a beautiful book cover. The chapters remind me of several algorithms available on SAGA GIS to handle digital elevation models, like lake filling and finding flow direction. Kudos to the authors, this is a nice resource to learn more about the topic.
Beautiful cover. I have dabbled with terrain generation with C++ and OpenGL and I would like to learn more about GIS and modelling. The PDF kills my computer when I open it on Chrome, though.
