Land Formations and Water Pollution

A simple system I have worked on is creating an animation of undisturbed land changing into a mine site. Using a simple map editor, I can save XML files that contain vertex data for the land grid, which holds values for terrain height, texture weights, and saturation. In the editor I created an additional array to hold the "change" values for the terrain map, which is the height at the end of the animation.

At the start of the program, I simple divide the difference between the height and the change values by the running time for the animation. Once the animation has started, I subtract the divided difference value from the height, and also change the saturation and the texture by this same value.

The process is simple, but the results are pretty strong.


Another supplementary system is general water pollution.  This system only discolors water, but could be easily used to represent sedimentary contamination, acid mine drainage, and thermal pollution.  My goal is to have this system work with streams and lakes, which means the pollution needs to be able to flow in a specific direction.

So far I am using a diffuse algorithm, and only spreading the pollution weight in the specified direction, but these results are not quite what I am looking for.  I want the pollution to disipate more from the source, and flow down stream if the emitter is turned off.  I will continue to work on this process define in more detail the algorithm used.