| Summary: | Gaming and other virtual environments are a big part of today's society, but manual modeling of terrains used in such environments can be a lengthy and tedious process. This thesis serves to explore a few methods of procedurally generating models of rocks or boulders that could be used in such contexts. This includes geometry and shading. A couple of different methods are explored. Sphere inflation, inspired by a classic sphere modeling method, involves "inflating" a base mesh (usually a platonic solid) to grow towards the boundaries of a sphere using an iterative subdivision approach, halting at a predetermined level of iteration. The second approach, recursive subdivision of segmented edges, involves dividing a base mesh into edge segments based on a predefined segment size, subdividing a polygon with pre-segmented edges with a recursive subdivision method based on the sphere inflation subdivision scheme. The segmented edges method is followed by a corner cutting step to "carve" the base mesh into a shape approaching a rock. The segmented edge method was not successfully finished within due time, but the sphere inflation method shows promise in generating fairly believable rock models. The shading includes GLSL based fragment and vertex shaders employing a Perlin noise based procedural granite 3D texture.
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