Procedural modeling historical buildings for serious games

[EN] In this paper we target the goal of obtaining detailed historical virtual buildings, like a castle or a city old town, through a methodology that facilitates their reconstruction. We allow having in a short time an approximation model that is flexible for being explored, analyzed and eventually modified. This is crucial for serious game development pipelines, whose objective is focused not only on accuracy and realism, but also on transmitting a sense of immersion to the player.[ES] En este trabajo apuntamos al objetivo de obtener edificios históricos virtuales con alto nivel de detalle, como por ejemplo un castillo o un barrio de una ciudad antigua, a través de una metodología que facilite su reconstrucción. Las herramientas que proponemos nos permiten obtener rápidamente un modelo aproximado y flexible para ser explorado, analizado o eventualmente modificado. Modelos con estas características son esenciales para el desarrollo en plataformas de juegos serios, cuyo objetivo fundamental se centra no sólo en la precisión y el realismo, sino también en transmitir una sensación de inmersión para el jugador.We would like to thank Adriana Desplans for help with the Carcassonne prototype. This work was partially funded with grant TIN2010-20590-C02-02 from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain.Besuievsky, G.; Patow, G. (2013). Procedural modeling historical buildings for serious games. Virtual Archaeology Review. 4(9):160-166. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2013.426816016649P. Müller, P. Wonka, S. Haegler, A. Ulmer, and L. Van Gool. Procedural modeling of buildings. ACM Trans. Graph., 25(3):614-623, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1141911.1141931P.Musialski, P. Wonka, D. Aliaga, M. Wimmer, L. van Gool and W. Purgathofer. A Survey of Urban Reconstruction. EUROGRAPHICS 2012 State of the Art ReportsS. Haegler, P.Mller and L. Van Gool. Procedural Modeling for Digital Cultural Heritage. EURASIP J. Image and Video Processing V 2009.R. Ridorsa, G. Patow, The skylineEngine System, in XX Congreso Español de Iinformàtica Gràfica, CEIG2010 (2010), pp. 207-216L. Krecklau, C. Manthei, L. Kobbelt. Procedural Interpolation of Historical City Maps. Vol. 31 (2012), Number 2G. Patow, User-Friendly Graph Editing for Procedural Buildings.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 32, no. 2, Mar./Apr. 2012, pp. 66--75; http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2010.104B.Watson, P. Müller, O. VERYOVKA, A.Filler., P. Wonka and C.Sexton. 2008. Procedural urban modeling in practice. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 28, 18-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2008.57CityEngine 2011. www.procedural.comG. Besuievsky and G. Patow, A Procedural Modelling Approach for Automatic Generation of LoD Building Models, Proceedings of the CISBAT 2011, pp. 993-998, Lausanne, Switzerland.O. Pueyo, G. Patow. Structuring Urban Data, Tech. Rep. IMA12-01-RR, Dept. IMA, Universitat de Girona (2012)S.Barroso, G.Patow. Recreación de estructuras arquitectónicas mediante modelaje

A PERSPECTIVE ON PROCEDURAL MODELING BASED ON STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

[EN] We introduce a study focused on procedural modeling papers that use methods of structural analysis, especially in its application to historic buildings such as churches and cathedrals. Moreover, we have taken a geometric structure of one of these papers and studied their behavior in a generic simulation tool, thus showing the feasibility of its analysis with non-specialized tools.[ES] Introducimos un estudio centrado en aquellos trabajos de modelado procedural que utilizan métodos de análisis estructural, especialmente en su aplicación para edificios históricos como iglesias y catedrales. Por otra parte, hemos tomado una estructura geométrica de uno de estos artículos y estudiado su comportamiento en una herramienta de simulación genérica, mostrando su factibilidad para realizar análisis con herramientas no especializadas.Fita, JL.; Besuievsky, G.; Patow, GA. (2016). A PERSPECTIVE ON PROCEDURAL MODELING BASED ON STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS. En 8th International congress on archaeology, computer graphics, cultural heritage and innovation. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 264-266. https://doi.org/10.4995/arqueologica8.2015.304526426

Recreation of architectural structures using procedural modeling based on volumes

[ES] Si bien el modelado procedural de edificios y otras estructuras arquitectónicas ha evolucionado de manera muy significativa en los últimos años, existe una notable ausencia de herramientas de alto nivel que permitan a un diseñador, un artista o un historiador, crear edificios o estructuras arquitectónicasimportantes de alguna ciudad en particular. En este trabajo presentaremos una herramienta para la creación de este tipo de edificios de manera simple y clara, siguiendo reglas que utilicen el lenguaje y metodología de creación propios de los edificios, y ocultando al usuario los detalles algorítmicos de lacreación del modelo.[EN] While the procedural modeling of buildings and other architectural structures has evolved very significantly in recent years, there is noticeable absence of high-level tools that allow a designer, an artist or an historian, creating important buildings or architectonic structures in a particular city. In this paper we present a tool for creating buildings in a simple and clear, following rules that use the language and methodology of creating their own buildings, and hiding the user the algorithmic details of the creation of the model.Queremos agradecer a Emily Whiting por los ejemplos que nos facilitó, así como a todos los miembros del Grup de Geometriai Gràfics de la Universitat de Girona por toda su ayuda. Este proyecto fue parcialmente financiado con el proyecto TIN2010-20590-C02-02 del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.Barroso Juan, S.; Patow, G. (2013). Recreación de estructuras arquitectónicas mediante modelaje procedural basado en volúmenes. Virtual Archaeology Review. 4(9):76-81. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2013.4251OJS768149P. Wonka, M. Wimmer, F. Sillion, and W. Ribarsky. Instant architecture. ACM Transaction on Graphics, 22(3):669-677, July 2003. Proceedings ACM SIGGRAPH 2003. 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1201775.882324P. Müller, P. Wonka, S. Haegler A. Ulmer, and L. Van Gool. Procedural modeling of buildings. ACM Trans. Graph., 25 (3):614-623, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1141911.1141931G. Patow, User-Friendly Graph Editing for Procedural Buildings. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 32, no. 2, Mar./Apr. 2012, pp. 66-75; doi:10.1109/MCG.2010.104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2010.104E. Whiting, J. Ochendorf, F. Durand, Procedural modeling of structurally-sound masonry buildings. ACMSIGGRAPH Asia 2009 papers (New York, NY, USA, 2009), SIGGRAPH Asia '09, ACM, pp. 112:1-112

Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC), Settlement Generation Competition

This paper introduces the settlement generation competition for Minecraft, the first part of the Generative Design in Minecraft challenge. The settlement generation competition is about creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents that can produce functional, aesthetically appealing and believable settlements adapted to a given Minecraft map - ideally at a level that can compete with human created designs. The aim of the competition is to advance procedural content generation for games, especially in overcoming the challenges of adaptive and holistic PCG. The paper introduces the technical details of the challenge, but mostly focuses on what challenges this competition provides and why they are scientifically relevant.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Part of the Foundations of Digital Games 2018 proceedings, as part of the workshop on Procedural Content Generatio

Procedural Modeling and Physically Based Rendering for Synthetic Data Generation in Automotive Applications

We present an overview and evaluation of a new, systematic approach for generation of highly realistic, annotated synthetic data for training of deep neural networks in computer vision tasks. The main contribution is a procedural world modeling approach enabling high variability coupled with physically accurate image synthesis, and is a departure from the hand-modeled virtual worlds and approximate image synthesis methods used in real-time applications. The benefits of our approach include flexible, physically accurate and scalable image synthesis, implicit wide coverage of classes and features, and complete data introspection for annotations, which all contribute to quality and cost efficiency. To evaluate our approach and the efficacy of the resulting data, we use semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles and robotic navigation as the main application, and we train multiple deep learning architectures using synthetic data with and without fine tuning on organic (i.e. real-world) data. The evaluation shows that our approach improves the neural network's performance and that even modest implementation efforts produce state-of-the-art results.Comment: The project web page at http://vcl.itn.liu.se/publications/2017/TKWU17/ contains a version of the paper with high-resolution images as well as additional materia