Artist-Controlled Modeling of Urban Environments

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

Information

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.

Additional Files and Images

Additional images and videos

image: Result from a Manhattan-like scene created with the methods described in this thesis. image: Result from a Manhattan-like scene created with the methods described in this thesis.

Additional files

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BibTeX

@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. ",
  month =      jul,
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/E193-02, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology ",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2010/scharl-master-thesis/",
}