This research project addresses the issue of efficiently modeling large urban environments for applications in urban planning, training and simulation in urban contexts, the movie industry, computer games, architecture, and virtual heritage. Modeling large urban environments is a difficult challenge and it can take several man years to create detailed models. This research project investigates methodology to quickly create detailed models that respect high-level constraints and contain additional plausible details based on architectural knowledge and knowledge about urban design.
The research project addresses five aspects of this general research challenge. (1) The investigation of new procedural modeling techniques in general: the investigators study procedural modeling techniques for urban environments. In the context of constraints, it is not only important to have an expressive and powerful modeling system to specify urban models, but it is equally important to have knowledge representations that are simple enough to allow the incorporation of constraints. (2) The investigation of parametric modeling techniques constrained by three-dimensional scans: the investigators study how to fit complex parametric models to acquired three dimensional data. The procedural models are controlled by several parameters and can be very complex. Temples will be studied as example models. (3) Procedural modeling of buildings constrained by building footprints and LIDAR: the research examines knowledge representations for buildings and algorithms to procedurally generate buildings when they are constrained by geometric data, such as building footprints and LIDAR. (4) Procedural modeling of facades constrained by images: the investigators develop knowledge representations for faades and algorithms to procedurally generate faades when they are constrained by images. (5) The project contains an outreach and education component that includes the integration of the research into the Computer Science curriculum and provides access to the tools and libraries to the Computer Graphics communities and the general public.
