Procedural Generation of Rock Piles using Aperiodic Tiling

Abstract

In this paper, we present a tiling method for generating piles of rocks without any computationally demanding physically-based simulation. Previous techniques rely on a periodic tiling of rocks and generate unrealistic repetitive patterns. In contrast, our approach relies on a modified corner cube algorithm to generate a set of aperiodic tiles. We generalize the construction method so that the geometry of rocks should straddle corner cubes with a view to avoiding unrealistic gaps in the arrangement of rocks. Moreover, we propose an original technique to control the shape of rocks into contact by computing the Voronoi cells using a parameterized anisotropic distance. Our method has been successfully used to generate landscapes and stone huts and walls with thousands of rocks piled together.