A Survey on Procedural Modelling for Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Procedural modelling deals with (semi-)automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modelling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non-technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modelling.

An improved LOD specification for 3D building models

“…They are normally derived from terrestrial laser scanning (El Meouche et al, 2013;Akmalia et al, 2014), very dense airborne laser scanning (Truong-Hong and Laefer, 2015), their combination (Kedzierski and Fryskowska, 2014), from the conversion and generalisation from architecturally detailed models such as BIM (Donkers et al, 2015;Geiger et al, 2015;Isikdag and Zlatanova, 2009;de Laat and van Berlo, 2011) and CAD (Lewis and Séquin, 1998;Huang et al, 2008), from architectural plans (Yin et al, 2009), ground imagery (Xiao et al, 2009), and with procedural modelling (Goetz, 2013;Smelik et al, 2014;Martinović et al, 2015). Recent research in the acquisition of LOD3 models is focused to automatisation, especially automatic detection of windows and other façade details (Becker, 2009(Becker, , 2011Van Gool and Martinović, 2013).…”

“…the recently investigated being drones (Nex and Remondino, 2013), radar (Zhu and Shahzad, 2014), handheld devices (Rosser et al, 2015;Sirmacek and Lindenbergh, 2014), procedural modelling (Wonka et al, 2003;Müller et al, 2006;Kelly and Wonka, 2011;Müller Arisona et al, 2013;Tsiliakou et al, 2014;Smelik et al, 2014), conversion from BIM and computer graphics models (Donkers et al, 2015;Kumar et al, 2016), and generation from 2D drawings (Gimenez et al, 2015)); (2) the number of data producers and national mapping agencies requesting 3D data is increasing , and without a finer specification data producers and users may resort to creating their own specifications (e.g. see the series from Blom ASA (2011)), which might increase the ambiguity; (3) the increase in quantity of data sets with non-homogenous LODs (Fan et al, 2014;Touya and Reimer, 2015;Arroyo Ohori et al, 2015a); and (4) use cases have different requirements when it comes to the complexity and quality of the data.…”

Digital preservation of cultural and scientific heritage: involving university students to raise awareness of its importance

“…According to the values of a number of attributes, the rule, a short routine, is applied to each individual object generating the 3D geometry and appearance. It is frequently used to produce virtual environments such as game scenery and 3D city models (Rodrigues, Magalhães, Moura, & Chalmers, 2014;Saldana & Johanson, 2013;Smelik, Tutenel, Bidarra, & Benes, 2014).…”

Congestion-Aware Warehouse Flow Analysis and Optimization

“…Smelik et al [1] presented a survey for procedural modeling methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds. We discuss some of the most relevant works to our research.…”