Procedural Generation of Modern 3D Cities
Typ
Examensarbete på kandidatnivå
Program
Publicerad
2020
Författare
Angergård, Theodor
Ansamaa, Marcus
Arvidsson, Alexander
Eriksson, Jacob
Håkansson, Anton
Truvé, Viktor
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
This paper investigates how techniques in Procedural Content Generation (PCG)
can be combined with computer graphics theory to generate digital 3D cities suitable
for use in media such as games, movies, and advertisements. This research was
conducted to discover ways to alleviate the otherwise time-consuming process of
manually modeling such cities. The investigation analyzes previous work and existing
PCG techniques in order to propose a new system capable of generating modern
cities from scratch. The validity of this system was then demonstrated through the
implementation of a city generation software.
As a result of this research, we contribute with CityCraft; a free, open-source, MIT
licensed desktop application that interactively generates modern cities in real-time.
These generated cities can be exported as 3D models into the royalty-free file format
glTF, making them compatible with a wide range of third-party tools for further
refinements. Although of less quality than manually modeled ones, the generated
cities are produced in a fraction of the time, and the application itself requires no
modeling or programming expertise to be used efficiently.
CityCraft demonstrates the potential of combining PCG and computer graphics to
automate the process of modeling cities. It also provides insight into how specific
techniques, such as Agent-based road generation, L-system-based buildings, and
Level of Detail (LOD), can be integrated to achieve performant generation. The
ambition with this contribution is that CityCraft can act as a useful stepping stone
for further city generation research within the open-source domain.