TY - JOUR
T1 - Procedural Content Graphs for Urban Modeling
AU - Brandão Silva, Pedro
AU - Eisemann, Elmar
AU - Bidarra, Rafael
AU - Coelho, António
PY - 2015/5/28
Y1 - 2015/5/28
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid://9192b7bf-ece6-4912-881b-6a3da96b3193
U2 - 10.1155/2015/808904
DO - 10.1155/2015/808904
M3 - Article
SN - 1687-7047
VL - 2015
SP - 1
EP - 15
JO - International Journal of Computer Games Technology
JF - International Journal of Computer Games Technology
M1 - 808904
ER -