Procedural 3D Asteroid Surface Detail Synthesis

Abstract

We present a novel noise model to procedurally generate volumetric terrain on implicit surfaces. The main idea is to combine a novel Locally Controlled 3D Spot noise (LCSN) for authoring the macro structures and 3D Gabor noise to add micro details. More specifically, a spatially-defined kernel formulation in combination with an impulse distribution enables the LCSN to generate arbitrary size craters and boulders, while the Gabor noise generates stochastic Gaussian details. The corresponding metaball positions in the underlying implicit surface preserve locality to avoid the globality of traditional procedural noise textures, which yields an essential feature that is often missing in procedural texture based terrain generators. Furthermore, different noise-based primitives are integrated through operators, i.e. blending, replacing, or warping into the complex volumetric terrain. The result is a completely implicit representation and, as such, has the advantage of compactness as well as flexible user control. We applied our method to generating high quality asteroid meshes with fine surface details.