̶M̶u̶l̶t̶i̶g̶r̶i̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶p̶i̶r̶e̶d̶ Eulerian hydraulic erosion

Eulerian Multigrid-Inspired Hydraulic Erosion

An interactive WebGPU terrain erosion simulation that explores advanced computational approaches to realistic landscape generation.

The Challenge

Traditional hydraulic erosion simulations often struggle with GPU efficiency - my previous Lagrangian approach required expensive atomic operations that created bottlenecks. I wanted to explore whether multigrid-inspired techniques, combined with an Eulerian framework, could create more GPU-friendly erosion while maintaining physical accuracy.

Technical Details

Eulerian Water Balance: Instead of tracking individual water particles, the simulation maintains water mass conservation across a grid, eliminating the need for atomic operations and improving GPU performance.

Thermal Erosion: In addition to hydraulic erosion, the simulation also does a thermal erosion pass with different angle of repose depending on terrain wetness (proximity to water).

Water redistribution: A final pass uses a Margolus neighborhood and redistributes water by doing a binary search for the water level in a 2x2 segment of the grid.