Interactive procedural building generation using kaleidoscopic iterated function systems

Abstract

We present an approach to designing and generating buildings at interactive rates. The system can run entirely on the GPU in a fragment shader and results can be viewed in real time. High quality raycast or raytraced results can be efficiently visualized because the buildings are represented as distance fields. By exploiting the visual complexity of a class of fractals known as kaleidoscopic iterated function systems (KIFS) we can generate detailed buildings reminiscent of ornate architectural styles, such as Gothic and Baroque, with simpler rules than grammar based methods.