So I kinda have this working but its not correct because it just averages, so I wanted to know if anyone here has any ideas.

I'm trying to simulate loose dirt compression under the tires of a vehicle to reduce the potential bumpiness of 'chunky' terrain. Currently how I do this is that I have a bounding box shape around my tires, set a little lower so they intersect with the terrain.

Each frame, I (currently) average all of the heights of each point in the terrain that are within the box bounds of that tire, and then set them all to that average. Clearly this won't work in most cases because, for example, if i'm on a hill, the terrain will deform way too much.

One way I thought was to have a max and min amount the points could raise and lower but that still doesn't seem to work properly and sometimes looks more like steps than smooth dirt.

I wanna say that there is probably a bit more to this that what i'm currently doing but I am not sure where to look. Could anyone here shed some light on this subject? Would I benefit any by maybe looking up some smoothing algorith or something similar?