Computational Terrain Modeling with Distance Functions for Large Scale Landscape Design

Abstract

The act of reshaping terrain to meet cultural, infrastructural and ecological demands becomes an increasingly important practice with upcoming challenges like sea level rise, landslides, floods and drought. While recent hardware innovation in 3D sensing and autonomous construction machinery has opened up the digital recording and digital fabrication of large-scale topographies, 3D modeling of digital terrain is still a complex and time-consuming task. The found geometry of the ground, largely irregular in shape and material constitution, poses serious problems and limitations for an efficient digital workflow today. Based on digital elevation data, this paper demonstrates a powerful computational landform editing tool using 2D distance functions.