Procedural generation of semantically plausible small-scale towns

Abstract

Procedural techniques have been successfully utilized for generating various kinds of 3D models. In this study, we propose a procedural method to build 3D towns that can be manipulated by a set of high-level semantic principles namely security, privacy, sustainability, social-life, economy, and beauty. Based on the user defined weights of these principles, our method generates a 3D settlement to accommodate a desired population over a given terrain. Our approach firstly determines where to establish the settlement over the large terrain which is followed by iteratively constructing the town. In both steps, the principles guide the decisions and our method generates natural looking small-scale 3D residential regions similar to the cities of pre-industrial era. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to build semantically plausible town models by presenting sample results over real world based terrains.