Modeling of Rock Form Taking into Account Growing Process of Columnar Joints

Abstract

In the present paper, we propose a rock form modeling method based on the simulation of the growing process of columnar joints. Joint form is an important factor in modeling which provides the visual feature of rocky scenery. However, there have been few reports on methods for generating rocky scenery taking into account the joint form. The proposed method consists of the following steps: (1) determining the temperature distribution in the given initial lava volume by via heat conduction simulation, (2) determining the contraction center curved lines according to the temperature distribution, (3) defining a three-dimensional Voronoi region corresponding to each of the contraction center curved lines, and (4) simulating weathering phenomena. For efficiency of computation, we use a voxel space of low-resolution for (1) and a voxel space of high-resolution for (2)-(4). Using this method, we can easily produce various types of columnar joint form by specifying the appropriate boundary conditions.