Procedural modeling of cities

  • Authors:

  • Yoav I. H. Parish;Pascal Müller

  • Affiliations:

  • ETH Zürich, Switzerland;Central Pictures, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Modeling a city poses a number of problems to computer graphics. Every urban area has a transportation network that follows population and environmental influences, and often a superimposed pattern plan. The buildings appearances follow historical, aesthetic and statutory rules. To create a virtual city, a roadmap has to be designed and a large number of buildings need to be generated. We propose a system using a procedural approach based on L-systems to model cities. From various image maps given as input, such as land-water boundaries and population density, our system generates a system of highways and streets, divides the land into lots, and creates the appropriate geometry for the buildings on the respective allotments. For the creation of a city street map, L-systems have been extended with methods that allow the consideration of global goals and local constraints and reduce the complexity of the production rules. An L-system that generates geometry and a texturing system based on texture elements and procedural methods compose the buildings.