Constraint-Aware Terrain Generation

In a mixed authoring workflow, a designer fixes the parts of a game level that matter, a road, a landmark, a race-track corridor, and the rest of the terrain has to be filled in automatically. The hard part is doing it fast, keeping the fixed points exact, and following the designer's slope preferences even where they conflict.

This started as my undergraduate thesis at Charles University, where I built the terrain tool in Unity and proposed the constraint-propagation idea at its core. My supervisor, Petr Šimůnek, then extended the method into a full paper, ran the experiments, and led the writing, so the author order reflects that he did the larger share.

The method propagates upper and lower height envelopes from the fixed points using slope-weighted path costs, then fills the gaps with a smooth base layer and bounded detail, clamping to the envelope so anchors stay exact. On the benchmark it cut global height bias by about 81% against the production baseline while staying in the same runtime regime. It was accepted as an oral paper at IEEE Conference on Games 2026 in Madrid.