Hydraulic Erosion Simulation Using Finite Volume Method on Graphics Processing Unit

An efficient physically-based hydraulic erosion algorithm is presented and implemented completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to simulate the dynamic erosion process. The erosion model is coupled by the 2D shallow water equations and equations for the sediment transport and bed evolution. A finite volume method of Godunov type with the first-order explicit HLLC scheme, which is robust in handling dry bed and well suited for exploiting the parallelism of the GPU, is used to solve the model. Dynamic time step is calculated on GPU using the stream reduction technique to avoid time-consuming data exchange between CPU and GPU. A novel boundary texture is used to adapt to various boundary conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method is effective and efficient, and can produce realistic erosion effects.