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Windblown sand around obstacles – simulation and validation of deposition patterns
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Windblown sand around obstacles – simulation and validation of deposition patterns

Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Volume 7, Number 1, page 13 - May 2024
Download the publication : WindblownSand.pdf [36.2Mo]  
Sand dunes are iconic landmarks of deserts, but can also put human infrastructures at risk, for instance by forming near buildings or roads. We present a simulator of sand erosion and deposition to predict how dunes form around and behind obstacles under wind. Inspired by both computer graphics and geo-sciences, our algorithm couples a fast wind flow simulation with physical laws of sand saltation and avalanching, which suffices to reproduce characteristic patterns of sand deposition. In particular, we validate our approach via a qualitative comparison of the erosion and deposition patterns produced by our simulator against real-world patterns measured by prior work under controlled conditions.

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Acknowledgements and Funding

We thank Emilie Yu for helping with the figures. We also thank Jingwei Tang for implementing the fluid solver. This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche project Invterra ANR-22-CE33-0012-01 and research and software donations from Adobe Inc.

Code

We provide a code base associated with this paper. Given a terrain described by a height map, you will be able to run our simulation pipeline that iteratively simulates the wind above the terrain and update the sand transported and deposited by this wind. This finally produces accurate sand landscape with for example natural sans dunes or erosion patterns around buildings appearing. Gitlab link

BibTex references

@Article{RDBC24,
  author       = "Rosset, Nicolas and Duvigneau, Regis and Bousseau, Adrien and Cordonnier, Guillaume",
  title        = "Windblown sand around obstacles – simulation and validation of deposition patterns",
  journal      = "Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques",
  number       = "1",
  volume       = "7",
  pages        = "13",
  month        = "May",
  year         = "2024",
  url          = "http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2024/RDBC24"
}

Other publications in the database

» Nicolas Rosset
» Regis Duvigneau
» Adrien Bousseau
» Guillaume Cordonnier