Procedural Modeling of Cities

Yoav Parish and Pascal Mueller
In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001

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.

Files:

• Paper: pdf
• Paper Video: mpeg (15mb)
• Presentation Slides: powerpoint (10mb) | pdf (2mb)
• Presentation Movies: streetnetwork generation (avi, 8mb) | building generation (avi, 4mb)
• Talk: quicktime (15mb)

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{Parish:2001:PMC,
    author={Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller},
    title={Procedural Modeling of Cities},
    booktitle={Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001},
    year= 2001,
    pages={301--308},
    publisher={ACM Press},
    editor={Eugene Fiume},
    isbn = {1-58113-374-X},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
}