alt.hn

3/31/2026 at 8:41:24 AM

Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

 https://blog.runevision.com/2026/03/fast-and-gorgeous-erosion-filter.html

by runevision

3/31/2026 at 8:41:24 AM

The blog post and the companion video (and shader source code) explain an erosion technique which emulates gorgeous branching gullies and ridges without simulation, while still allowing every point to be evaluated in isolation, which means it’s fast, GPU-friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks.

by runevision

4/1/2026 at 10:47:34 PM

The video was really well done, very interesting even though I’m not very familiar with the subject. Is this the sort of thing that would go into a game like No Man’s Sky to improve the planet generation?

by have_faith

4/2/2026 at 1:46:53 AM

In my opinion, any game featuring large-scale, realistic terrain would benefit from a tool like this. You simply can't hand-craft every ridge on a mountain range at that scale. Unless you're recreating a real-world location using satellite and LIDAR height data, procedural filters are the only way to achieve that level of geological detail efficiently.

by lynnharry

4/1/2026 at 10:27:43 PM

very cool!

by jadbox

4/1/2026 at 11:31:39 PM

You can play with the interactive example here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/sf23W1

Click and drag your mouse around the preview to see how fast it runs

by spartanatreyu

4/1/2026 at 10:43:09 PM

Truly fantastic work! "Holy Grail" is right! Terrain generation just got an upgrade so the tooling is about to start producing some really beautiful results in real time. That's going to be a blast to work with. Thanks!

by catapart

4/2/2026 at 3:16:01 AM

I enjoyed Dwarf Fortress random map generation because it simulated erosion pretty well. Small creeks started in the mountains and flowed to the ocean getting larger as it went. Deep valleys and waterfalls too in places made for interesting maps.

Be interesting if we can start getting 3D games with random maps that are realistically generated and have interesting features in the future.

by pixl97

4/2/2026 at 7:48:36 AM

It is worth noting that although the result here is visually impressive for erosion aesthetics, it is also not practical for the generation of physically-plausible lakes and rivers. Proper hydrological simulation is required because non-local information is crucial, something which this shader technique doesn't attempt to simulate. Without that, you're likely to end up with rivers flow uphill and lakes that don't properly overflow from valley passes and suchlike.

Source: I'm a core dev for Veloren, which uses a very detailed hydrological simulation for its world generation. More info here: https://veloren.net/blog/devblog-43/

by zesterer

4/2/2026 at 2:04:28 AM

Thank you for writing this up, it was great to see all of the comparisons. Very well put together!

by davidanekstein

4/1/2026 at 11:33:12 PM

Being able to process separate chunks in parallel is the killer feature for any procgen algorithm - nice.

by p1necone

4/2/2026 at 1:34:41 AM

Any remember the 90s software Terragen and Vue3d?

by brcmthrowaway

4/2/2026 at 12:51:00 AM

Amazing work!

by bananaboy

4/2/2026 at 1:49:20 AM

Great write-up. Results are quite stunning.

by renewiltord

4/2/2026 at 1:36:39 AM

might be fun to try to find parameters that agree well with the statistics of hi res lidar data, perhaps conditioned on geological maps. E.g. describe a geological history with layers of different formations and a pattern of uplift, and get a terrain which agrees with it statistically.

Without simulating erosion you're not going to get a faithful recreation of any particular geological history, but you could get something that looked consistent by virtue of being consistent with the statistics of that topography.

by nullc