In this paper, we present a new method to model the hydraulic erosion phenomenon which runs at interactive rates on today’s computers. The method is based on the velocity fi eld of the running water, which is created with an effi cient

shallow-water fl uid model. The velocity fi eld is used to cal culate the erosion and deposition process, and the sediment transportation process. The method has been carefully de signed to be implemented totally on GPU, and thus takes

full advantage of the parallelism of current graphics hardware. Results from experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and effi cient. It can create realistic erosion effects by rainfall and river fl ows, and produce fast simulation results for terrains with large sizes.