Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#1

Post by runevision » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter
blog.runevision.com

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#2

Post by runevision » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

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.

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#3

Post by jadbox » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 10:27 PM UTC

runevision wrote: post #2

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.

very cool!

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#4

Post by catapart » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

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!

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#5

Post by have_faith » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

runevision wrote: post #2

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.

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?

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#6

Post by spartanatreyu » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

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

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#7

Post by p1necone » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

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

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#8

Post by bananaboy » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC

Amazing work!

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#9

Post by brcmthrowaway » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

Any remember the 90s software Terragen and Vue3d?

Re: Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

#10

Post by nullc » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

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.