Artist-Controlled Modeling of Urban Environments

Johannes Scharl
Artist-Controlled Modeling of Urban Environments
[ poster] [ thesis]
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Abstract

Creating large-scale virtual environments for interactive applications such as computer games poses a demanding challenge for computer graphics. Urban environments are usually hand-crafted by artists using commercial 3D modeling software. For today’s detail-rich games, this becomes less and less feasible. Procedural modeling techniques strive to help artists to create virtual worlds in less time. In this thesis, I present a system that helps artists and game designers to plan, layout and model urban environments for games and other media. Methods are described to create street networks manually and procedurally and to edit them interactively at any time in the development process. A stable street tessellation technique is employed that is able to represent street segments as well as crossings connecting an arbitrary number of streets and that adapts to the underlying terrain. Furthermore, I propose a constraint based method to automatically populate a city with buildings from a set of existing building models.

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@mastersthesis{scharl-master-thesis,
  title =      "Artist-Controlled Modeling of Urban Environments",
  author =     "Johannes Scharl",
  year =       "2010",
  abstract =   "Creating large-scale virtual environments for interactive
               applications such as computer games poses a demanding
               challenge for computer graphics. Urban environments are
               usually hand-crafted by artists using commercial 3D modeling
               software. For today’s detail-rich games, this becomes
               less and less feasible. Procedural modeling techniques
               strive to help artists to create virtual worlds in less
               time. In this thesis, I present a system that helps artists
               and game designers to plan, layout and model urban
               environments for games and other media. Methods are
               described to create street networks manually and
               procedurally and to edit them interactively at any time in
               the development process. A stable street tessellation
               technique is employed that is able to represent street
               segments as well as crossings connecting an arbitrary number
               of streets and that adapts to the underlying terrain.
               Furthermore, I propose a constraint based method to
               automatically populate a city with buildings from a set of
               existing building models. ",
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/186, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology",
  month =      jul,
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2010/scharl-master-thesis/",
}