ABSTRACT
Procedural generation of virtual worlds is a promising alternative to classical manual modelling approaches, which usually require a large amount of effort and expertise. However, it suffers from a number of issues; most importantly, the lack of user control over the generation process and its outcome. Because of this, the result of a procedural method is highly unpredictable, rendering it almost unusable for virtual world designers.
This paper focuses on providing user control to deliver an outcome consistent with designer's intent. For this, we introduce semantic constraints, a flexible concept to express high-level designer's intent in intuitive terms as e.g. line of sight. Our constraint evaluation method is capable of detecting the context in which such a constraint is specified, automatically adapting to surrounding features of the virtual world. From experiments performed within our prototype modelling system, we can conclude that semantic constraints are another step forward in making procedural generation of virtual worlds more controllable and accessible to non-specialist designers.
- F. Belhadj. Terrain Modeling: a Constrained Fractal Model. In AFRIGRAPH '07: Proceedings of the 5 th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, Visualisation and Interaction in Africa, pages 197--204, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Belhadj and P. Audibert. Modeling Landscapes with Ridges and Rivers: Bottom Up Approach. In GRAPHITE '05: Proceedings of the 3 rd International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, pages 447--450, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Beneš, O. Štava, R. Měch, and G. Miller. Guided Procedural Modeling. In Computer Graphics Forum: Proceedings of Eurographics 2011, pages 325--334, Llandudno, UK, 2011. Eurographics Association.Google Scholar
- J. Doran and I. Parberry. Controlled Procedural Terrain Generation Using Software Agents. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 2(2):111--119, June 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Gain, P. Marais, and W. Strasser. Terrain Sketching. In I3D '09: Proceedings of the 2009 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, pages 31--38, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Galin, A. Peytavie, N. Marchal, and E. Gurin. Procedural Generation of Roads. In Computer Graphics Forum: Proceedings of Eurographics 2010, volume 29, pages 429--438, Norrköping, Sweden, May 2010. Eurographics Association.Google Scholar
- K. R. Kamal and Y. S. Uddin. Parametrically Controlled Terrain Generation. In GRAPHITE '07: Proceedings of the 5 th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australia and Southeast Asia, pages 17--23, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Müller, P. Wonka, S. Haegler, A. Ulmer, and L. V. Gool. Procedural Modeling of Buildings. In SIGGRAPH '06: Proceedings of the 33 rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pages 614--623, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. K. Musgrave, C. E. Kolb, and R. S. Mace. The Synthesis and Rendering of Eroded Fractal Terrains. In SIGGRAPH '89: Proceedings of the 16 th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pages 41--50, New York, NY, USA, 1989. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Prusinkiewicz and A. Lindenmayer. The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY, USA, 1990. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. M. Smelik, K. J. de Kraker, T. Tutenel, R. Bidarra, and S. A. Groenewegen. A Survey of Procedural Methods for Terrain Modelling. In Proceedings of the CASA Workshop on 3D Advanced Media In Gaming And Simulation (3AMIGAS), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 2009.Google Scholar
- R. M. Smelik, T. Tutenel, K. J. de Kraker, and R. Bidarra. Integrating Procedural Generation and Manual Editing of Virtual Worlds. In PCGames '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, pages 1--8, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. M. Smelik, T. Tutenel, K. J. de Kraker, and R. Bidarra. A Declarative Approach to Procedural Modeling of Virtual Worlds. Computers & Graphics, 35(2):352--363, April 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Smith, J. Whitehead, and M. Mateas. Tanagra: a Mixed-Initiative Level Design Tool. In FDG '10: Proceedings of the 5 th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, page 209--216, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Stachniak and W. Stuerzlinger. An Algorithm for Automated Fractal Terrain Deformation. Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence, 1:64--76, May 2005.Google Scholar
- T. Tutenel, R. Bidarra, R. M. Smelik, and K. J. de Kraker. The Role of Sematics in Games and Simulations. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 6:1--35, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Zhou, J. Sun, G. Turk, and J. Rehg. Terrain Synthesis from Digital Elevation Models. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(4):834--848, July--Aug. 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Semantic constraints for procedural generation of virtual worlds
Recommendations
Integrating procedural generation and manual editing of virtual worlds
PCGames '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in GamesBecause of the increasing detail and size of virtual worlds, designers are more and more urged to consider employing procedural methods to alleviate part of their modeling work. However, such methods are often unintuitive to use, difficult to integrate, ...
Feeling Virtual Worlds: An Exploration into Coupling Virtual and Kinaesthetic Experiences
TEI '18: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied InteractionIn this paper we describe an exploratory study that incorporates the design, implementation and study of a system that utilises virtual reality, tangible interaction and force feedback. The approach we take is to design a VR system that incorporates a ...
A Survey on Procedural Modelling for Virtual Worlds
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 ...
Comments