Computer Graphics and Visualization • Publications

Int J Comput Games Technol

Procedural Content Graphs for Urban Modeling

Pedro Silva, Elmar Eisemann, Rafael Bidarra, and Antonio Coelho

Manipulation of different entity types within the same scene. A street entity led to the generation of several buildings, represented as shapes. Each building was given a number which was then used to produce a custom texture to attach next to each door. Light sources were then instanced on the location of each street lamp, just above the doors. The generation of each entity type therefore greatly benefits when processed in sequence, in a single pipeline, instead of in separate environments.

Massive procedural content creation, for example, for virtual urban environments, is a difficult, yet important challenge. While shape grammars are a popular example of effectiveness in architectural modeling, they have clear limitations regarding readability, manageability, and expressive power when addressing a variety of complex structural designs. Moreover, shape grammars aim at geometry specification and do not facilitate integration with other types of content, such as textures or light sources, which could rather accompany the generation process. We present procedural content graphs, a graph-based solution for procedural generation that addresses all these issues in a visual, flexible, and more expressive manner. Besides integrating handling of diverse types of content, this approach introduces collective entity manipulation as lists, seamlessly providing features such as advanced filtering, grouping, merging, ordering, and aggregation, essentially unavailable in shape grammars. Hereby, separated entities can be easily merged or just analyzed together in order to perform a variety of context-based decisions and operations. The advantages of this approach are illustrated via examples of tasks that are either very cumbersome or simply impossible to express with previous grammar approaches.

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Publisher Paper preprint

Citation

Pedro Silva, Elmar Eisemann, Rafael Bidarra, and Antonio Coelho, Procedural Content Graphs for Urban Modeling, Int J Comput Games Technol, 2015, pp. 808904:1–808904:15, 2015.

BibTex

@article{bib:silva:2015,
    author       = { Silva, Pedro and Eisemann, Elmar and Bidarra, Rafael and Coelho, Antonio },    
    title        = { Procedural Content Graphs for Urban Modeling },
    journal      = { Int J Comput Games Technol },
    volume       = { 2015 },
    year         = { 2015 },
    pages        = { 808904:1--808904:15 },
    doi          = { 10.1155/2015/808904 },
    dblp         = { journals/ijcgt/SilvaEBC15 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/266 },
}