Procedural Generation and Rendering of Large-Scale Open-World Environments

Open-world video games give players a large environment to explore along with increased freedom to navigate and manipulate that environment. These requirements pose several problems that must be addressed by a game\u27s graphics engine. Often there are a large number of visible objects, such as all of the trees in a forest, as well as objects comprised of large amounts of geometry, such as terrain. An open-world graphics engine must be able to render large environments at varying levels of detail and smoothly transition between detail levels to provide a believable experience. Often this involves finding a way to both store and generate the large amounts of geometry that represent the environment. In this thesis we present a system for generating and rendering large exterior environments, with a focus on terrain and vegetation. We use a region-based procedural generation algorithm to create environments of varying types. This algorithm produces content that can be rendered at multiple levels of detail. The terrain is rendered volumetrically to support caves, overhangs, and cliffs, but is also rendered using heightmaps to allow for large view distances. Vegetation is implemented using procedurally generated meshes and impostors. The volumetric terrain is editable in real time, which limits our ability to pre-generate or cache large amounts of geometry, and also limits the number of assumptions we can make with regard to visibility. We support a view distance of at least 25 miles in each direction, though distant objects are rendered at low resolution. The heightmap terrain used to achieve this view distance consists of over 360,000 triangles. Our system runs at 180 frames per second on commodity desktop hardware

Voxel Optimization

Voxel Optimization This poster presentation covers optimization for voxels. They can be thought of as three dimensional pixels. Vo coming from volume and xel from pixel. Voxels are just values placed in a 3D grid. Voxels have many interesting uses in the medical and scientific field, especially in geology. One use in computer science is storing world information for video games or graphical applications. One very popular example is Minecraft, a game that allows all of the world to be changed, that uses cube shaped voxels. The first topic will be on the naive approach of building a model from a Minecraft like voxel, face merging, and greedy meshing. These are techniques to improve performance and reduce memory consumption. Face merging is combining flat surfaces into a single polygon. An example is combining multiple touching rectangles into one larger rectangle. Greedy meshing is an excellent algorithm to do this by minimizing the rectangle count. The second main topic is about reducing disk space usage. Multiple compression algorithms will be compared using real Dwarf Fortress data. This is a game similar to Minecraft that also uses voxels for world data. Some algorithm examples are run length encoding, Zlib\u27s deflate compression, and CCITT (Huffman) Encoding

Procedural feature generation for volumetric terrains using voxel grammars

© 2018 Terrain generation is a fundamental requirement of many computer graphics simulations, including computer games, flight simulators and environments in feature films. There has been a considerable amount of research in this domain, which ranges between fully automated and semi-automated methods. Voxel representations of 3D terrains can create rich features that are not found in other forms of terrain generation techniques, such as caves and overhangs. In this article, we introduce a semi-automated method of generating features for volumetric terrains using a rule-based procedural generation system. Features are generated by selecting subsets of a voxel grid as input symbols to a grammar, composed of user-created operators. This results in overhangs and caves generated from a set of simple rules. The feature generation runs on the CPU and the GPU is utilised to extract a robust mesh from the volumetric dataset

Procedural Generation and Rendering of Realistic, Navigable Forest Environments: An Open-Source Tool

Simulation of forest environments has applications from entertainment and art creation to commercial and scientific modelling. Due to the unique features and lighting in forests, a forest-specific simulator is desirable, however many current forest simulators are proprietary or highly tailored to a particular application. Here we review several areas of procedural generation and rendering specific to forest generation, and utilise this to create a generalised, open-source tool for generating and rendering interactive, realistic forest scenes. The system uses specialised L-systems to generate trees which are distributed using an ecosystem simulation algorithm. The resulting scene is rendered using a deferred rendering pipeline, a Blinn-Phong lighting model with real-time leaf transparency and post-processing lighting effects. The result is a system that achieves a balance between high natural realism and visual appeal, suitable for tasks including training computer vision algorithms for autonomous robots and visual media generation.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Computer Graphics Forum (CGF). The application and supporting configuration files can be found at https://github.com/callumnewlands/ForestGenerato

Volumetric Terain Generator and Real-Time Renderer

Import 05/08/2014Cílem práce je vytvořit volumetrický generátor terénu a vizualizátor schopný zobrazit krajinu v realném čase. Generování terénu je realizováno za pomocí algoritmu Simplex noise, který se následně za pomocí Marching Cubes převede do podoby vhodné k vykreslení za pomocí standardního zobrazovacího řetězce. Výslednou krajinou je možné se volně pohybovat, na základě pokynů upravovat její podobu a využít tak plného potenciálu objemových dat.The aim of this thesis is to create a volumetric terrain generator and visualiser able to render the landscape in real-time. The process of terrain generation is realized using Simplex noise algorithm, which is subsequently using Marching Cubes to turn voxel data representation into a form suitable for rendering using standard imaging chain. The resulting application allows the user to move freely over the generated teraing and also to modify the terrain, which shows full potential of the volumetric terrain renderer.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř

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

PROGENY: A GRASSHOPPER PLUG-IN THAT AUGMENTS CELLULAR AUTOMATA ALGORITHMS FOR 3D FORM EXPLORATIONS

Cellular automata (CA) is a well-known computation method introduced by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s. Since then, it has been studied in various fields such as computer science, biology, physics, chemistry, and art. The Classic CA algorithm is a calculation of a grid of cells\u27 binary states based on neighboring cells and a set of rules. With the variation of these parameters, the CA algorithm has evolved into alternative versions such as 3D CA, Multiple neighborhood CA, Multiple rules CA, and Stochastic CA (Url-1). As a rule-based generative algorithm, CA has been used as a bottom-up design approach in the architectural design process in the search for form (Frazer,1995; Dinçer et al., 2014), in simulating the displacement of individuals in space, and in revealing complex relations at the urban scale (Güzelci, 2013). There are implementations of CA tools in 3D design software for designers as additional scripts or plug-ins. However, these often have limited ability to create customized CA algorithms by the designer. This study aims to create a customizable framework for 3D CA algorithms to be used in 3D form explorations by designers. Grasshopper3D, which is a visual scripting environment in Rhinoceros 3D, is used to implement the framework. The main difference between this work and the current Grasshopper3D plug-ins for CA simulation is the customizability and the real-time control of the framework. The parameters that allow the CA algorithm to be customized are; the initial state of the 3D grid, neighborhood conditions, cell states and rules. CA algorithms are created for each customizable parameter using the framework. Those algorithms are evaluated based on the ability to generate form. A voxel-based approach is used to generate geometry from the points created by the 3D cellular automata. In future, forms generated using this framework can be used as a form generating tool for digital environments

Desarrollo de un Asset en Unity para la generación automática de mapas 2D en videojuegos de plataforma

[ES] Desarrollo de una herramienta que permita la generación automática de mapas de juegos tipo 2D de plataformas para el motor de videojuegos Unity. La herramienta será configurable para permitir adaptarse a una alta variedad de juegos, permitiendo personalizar tanto la disposición de los elementos interactivos de juego, como de los elementos estéticos. Se utilizarán parámetros de configuración como la longitud media y la dispersión del tamaño de la plataforma, elementos empleados para construirla, distancia mínima y máxima entre plataformas, diferencia de alturas, distribución de recompensas, distribución de elementos de entorno y en general cualquier otro parámetro que permita generar una gran variedad de mapas para juegos de plataformas.[EN] Development of a tool that allows automatic generation of 2D platform maps for the Unity video game engine. The tool will be configurable to allow adapting to a wide variety of games, allowing the user to customize both the layout of the interactive game elements as well as the aesthetic elements. Configuration parameters will be used such as the average length and dispersion of the platform size, elements used to build it, minimum and maximum distance between platforms, difference in heights, distribution of rewards, distribution of environment elements and in general any other parameter that allows the user to generate a great variety of maps for platform games.Bizau, DI. (2021). Desarrollo de un Asset en Unity para la generación automática de mapas 2D en videojuegos de plataforma. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/173709TFG

Real-time rendering and physics of complex dynamic terrains modeled as CSG trees of DEMs carved with spheres

We present a novel proposal for modeling complex dynamic terrains that offers real-time rendering, dynamic updates and physical interaction of entities simultaneously. We can capture any feature from landscapes including tunnels, overhangs and caves, and we can conduct a total destruction of the terrain. Our approach is based on a Constructive Solid Geometry tree, where a set of spheres are subtracted from a base Digital Elevation Model. Erosions on terrain are easily and efficiently carried out with a spherical sculpting tool with pixel-perfect accuracy. Real-time rendering performance is achieved by applying a one-direction CPU–GPU communication strategy and using the standard depth and stencil buffer functionalities provided by any graphics processor.This work has been partially funded by Ministeri de Ciència i Innovació (MICIN), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the Fons Europeu de Desenvolupament Regional (FEDER) (project PID2021-122136OB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001 1033/FEDER, UE).Postprint (published version