February 8,2009 by gleicher (link)
Course on Shape Grammars

There was a SIGGRAPH 2008 course on Shape Grammars. I don't know if this will be helpful, but its here: reader:SIGCourses/ShapeGrammars-SIGGRAPH08-Course.pdf

February 6,2009 by gleicher (link)
L-Systems (for plants and beyond)

Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz (Dr. P to those of us who know him) pretty much introduced L-Systems to the computer graphics world, and has been the leader in making plants for decades. His stuff also inspires a lot of procedural generation of other things.

http://algorithmicbotany.org/ is his group's web page. I haven't checked to see if they have a recent survey paper. Their book (from the 90s) was really neat.

February 6,2009 by amoore (link)
RE:RE: Tom's Wandering Thoughts

Here is a java version of that screen saver I mentioned earlier. http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/

You can make L-system trees fairly real time. We had some quickly done ones in our (Andrew, Jon, and I) graphics town. Making them look not like fractal trees I imagine would be harder, especially generation of cool leaves. Changing LOD of these trees without popping would be pretty sweet, as would be blowing in the wind.

February 6,2009 by jbyrne (link)
RE: Tom's Wandering Thoughts

I'm digging speedtree, but I don't know much about it. It doesn't look real time at all. My big goal is to have some sort of iterative plant growth in real time time that looks cool and moves "right". I'm in a botany class right now and think I can fake it reasonably well. And trees (the graph, not the plant) and trees (the plant, not the graph) are cool and related. Yay trees.

February 6,2009 by jbyrne (link)
John's Readings

I sort of changed my mind about what I want to do, moving from procedural cities to procedural flora and botany. I'm just not digging architecture.

link

February 6,2009 by amoore (link)
Adrian's link

Here is a list of implementations of city building algorithms: http://www.vterrain.org/Culture/BldCity/Proc/

And on their main webpage http://www.vterrain.org/ they have a lot of other types of procedurally generated content.

February 6,2009 by amoore (link)
Adrian's throughts

Here are my readings : http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/AdvancedGraphics09/Amoore/Project1Readings

I'm starting to think that a house generation algorithm would be very cool. A lot of the things used in construction (like extrusion, adding and subtracting geometries) may be faster implemented with libraries that already had these features. We could write a blender script in python that generates a model of a house.

The other thing would to make a city street planner. It could take into account city zoning and things of that nature, making an initial city. If one area (like food) was to far away it could cut out some housing and put one in. You could then run these kinds of checks repeatedly until it anneals into a plausible city.

Did anyone remember that screen saver that started drawing fractal lines? Eventually when it was done it looked kinda like a city map. It was included in some earlier versions of ubuntu, but I think they took it out.

February 6,2009 by tgrim (link)
Tom's wandering thoughts

I've got a list of stuff I've read going on here: Project01Readings.

I'm liking the idea of going from landscape to city roads to urban planning to the actual buildings placed there. There are some interesting readings I've found and some more of my random thoughts at Project01

February 6,2009 by jhugo (link)
Jeff's idea

My reading list is here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/AdvancedGraphics09/Jhugo/Project1Reading

I think a building generator program would be a good project, and could be integrated with someone else's project that produced city layout or building interiors.

February 2,2009 by gleicher (link)
Suggested Readings

Here are the initial suggested readings for everyone interested in a Procedural Model / City Generation project:

I know less about City generation than I would like. This is my chance to learn too!

Some readings to start with:

• Procedural Urban Modeling in Practice a paper that surveys the topic, with a focus on getting to how its used in the EA need for speed game. Good references too. http://www.public.asu.edu/~pwonka/Publications/2008.CG&A.Watson.Procedural%20Modeling%20Tutorial.pdf http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4497893
• There was a SIGGRAPH course with very comprehensive notes in 2007. I've placed the notes at reader:SIGCourses/Urban07/. I'd recommend skimming through them.
• Peter Wonka (a professor at Arizona State) has a number of relevant papers on his web site http://www.public.asu.edu/~pwonka/Publications/publications.html
• Pascal Mueller is another leader in the area, his papers are here http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/publications.html

The above list was confirmed with a friend who works at EA.

I am open to you exploring other forms of procedural modeling, but you should learn at least a little bit about city modeling (since it brings up nice concepts like grammars).