In Proceedings of IEEE 2025 Conference on Games

Non-Uniform Tile Wave Function Collapse

Rolf Piepenbrink and Rafael Bidarra

Paper Cite More

Procedural Content Generation methods enable the creation of varied content algorithmically. One such method is Wave Function Collapse (WFC), a tile-based local constraint solver commonly applied to texture, map and level generation for grid-based content; it is able to create varied output from the same set of rules, usually derived from an input sample. However, a glaring limitation of WFC is that it only operates on tiles of the same shape and size. We propose Non-Uniform Tile Wave Function Collapse (nutWFC), an extension of WFC that supports multi-cellular tiles with varying shapes and sizes, so-called Non-Uniform Tiles (NUTs). Familiar examples of such tiles can be found in LEGO® and Tetris. The algorithm guarantees NUT shape and size preservation even under WFC’s Overlapping Model in three dimensions. We show that nutWFC is a super-set of WFC that harmonizes strict NUT shape and size constraints with WFC’s output diversity without significant performance penalties. We illustrate the expressive power of nutWFC with a few results that explore the advantages of NUTs and would therefore not be feasible with WFC.

More Information

Gallery

Citation

BibTex

@inproceedings{bib:piepenbrink:2025,
    author       = { Piepenbrink, Rolf and Bidarra, Rafael },    
    title        = { Non-Uniform Tile Wave Function Collapse },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of IEEE 2025 Conference on Games },
    editors      = { Liu, J and Zhu, J },
    year         = { 2025 },
    pages        = { 1--8 },
    publisher    = { IEEE Press },
    organization  = { IEEE },
    address      = { Lisbon, Portugal },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/814 },
}