Aeolian Sand Movement and Interacting with Vegetation: A GPU Based Simulation and Visualization Method

Simulation and visualization on aeolian sand movement and its interaction with vegetation are a challenging subject. In this work, we proposed a physically and procedurally based modeling and simulation method that can be used to synthesize sandy terrain with vegetation covers. For realizing a real-time simulation process, we implemented the method on the programming graphics processing unit (GPU). We tried to include significant mechanisms of sand transportation into the sand model, such as saltation and creep behaviors, while simplified the vegetation model and wind field model to make the simulation feasible and affordable. As a preliminary study, we conducted several numerical demonstrations on simple scenarios with or without vegetation. The simulation results confirmed that the proposed method is applicable for reaching visually realistic images in comparison with the real images from a desert field.