Procedural Generation of 3D Caves for Games on the GPU

Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCG) is a thriv- ing field of research and application. Recent presented ex- amples range from levels, stories and race tracks to complete rulesets for games. However, there is not much research to date on procedural 3D modeling of caves, and similar en- closed natural spaces. In this paper, we present a modular pipeline to procedurally generate underground caves in real- time, to be used as part of larger landscapes in game worlds. We propose a three step approach, which can be fully im- plemented using General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing (GPGPU) technology: 1) an L-System to em- ulate the expanded cracks and passages which form cave structures in nature, 2) a noise-perturbed metaball approach for virtual 3D carving, and 3) a rendering component for isosurface extraction of the modeled voxel data, and fur- ther mesh enhancement through shader programming. We demonstrate how the interaction between these components produce results comparable to real world caves, and show that the solution is viable for video game environments. For this, we present the findings of a user study we conducted among indie-game developers and players, using our results

Skeletal Reconstruction of Branching Shapes

Published under the name Marie-Paule Cani-GascuelInternational audienceWe present a new method for the implicit reconstruction of branching shapes from a set of scattered data points. The method is based on the computation of a geometric skeleton inside the data set. This skeleton is simplied in order to lter noise and converted into skeletal elements { a graph of interconnected curves { that generate an implicit surface. We use Bezier triangles as extra skeletal elements to perform bulge free blends between branches while controlling the blend extent. This leads to a smooth implicit representation of the shape, directly computed in a purely geometric way