Real-time procedural generation of `pseudo infinite' cities

Proceedings of the 1st …, 2001

This paper presents a study about the comparison of several methods of image cache management; image caching is a recent approach of rendering, based on the concepts of impostors and hierarchical scene subdivision, which exploits the coherence of consecutive frames in a graphic sequence. Anyway existent methods don't exploit the aspects in common with cache memory management; therefore they organize the image cache without using an optimal strategy. An implementation with variable factors and strategies is presented along with the results from the comparison of their performances.

2000

We present a new approach for faster rendering of large synthetic environments using video-based representations. We decompose the large environment into cells and pre-compute video based impostors using MPEG compression to represent sets of objects that are far from each cell. At runtime, we decode the MPEG streams and use rendering algorithms that provide nearly constant-time random access to any frame. The resulting system has been implemented and used for an interactive walkthrough of a model of a house with 260,000 polygons and realistic lighting and textures. It is able to render this model at 16 frames per second (an eightfold improvement over simpler algorithms) on average on a Pentium II PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card.

Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '00, 2000

We present a new approach for faster rendering of large synthetic environments using video-based representations. We decompose the large environment into cells and pre-compute video based impostors using MPEG compression to represent sets of objects that are far from each cell. At runtime, we decode the MPEG streams and use rendering algorithms that provide nearly constant-time random access to any frame. The resulting system has been implemented and used for an interactive walkthrough of a model of a house with 260,000 polygons and realistic lighting and textures. It is able to render this model at 16 frames per second (an eightfold improvement over simpler algorithms) on average on a Pentium II PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card.

1998

We present a framework for rendering very large 3D models at nearly interactive rates. The framework scales with model size. Our framework can integrate multiple rendering acceleration techniques, including visibility culling, geometric levels of detail, and image-based approaches. We describe the database representation scheme for massive models used by the framework. We provide an effective pipeline to manage the allocation of system resources among different techniques. We demonstrate the system on a model of a coal-fired power plant composed of more than 15 million triangles.

2003

With advances in computer hardware, 3D game worlds are becoming larger and more complex. Consequently the development of game worlds becomes increasingly time and resource intensive. This paper presents a framework for generation of entire virtual worlds using procedural generation. The approach is demonstrated with the example of a virtual city.

1999

We present a system for rendering very complex 3D models at interactive rates. We select a subset of the model as preferred viewpoints and partition the space into virtual cells. Each cell contains near geometry, rendered using levels of detail and visibility culling, and far geometry, rendered as a textured depth mesh. Our system automatically balances the screen-space errors resulting from geometric simplification with those from textureddepth-mesh distortion. We describe our prefetching and data management schemes, both crucial for models significantly larger than available system memory. We have successfully used our system to accelerate walkthroughs of a 13 million triangle model of a large coal-fired power plant and of a 1.7 million triangle architectural model. We demonstrate the walkthrough of a 1.3 GB power plant model with a 140 MB cache footprint.

2006

A novel approach to generate virtual building interiors in real-time is presented. The interiors are generated in a top-down fashion using architectural guidelines. Although a building interior in its entirety may be quite large, only the portions that are needed immediately are generated. This lazy generation scheme allows the use of only a fraction of the memory that a model of the entire interior would otherwise require. Our method provides real-time frame rates, making it attractive for realtime interactive applications.

The Visual Computer, 2010

We present a novel approach for interactive rendering of massive 3D models. Our approach integrates adaptive sampling-based simplification, visibility culling, out-ofcore data management and level-of-detail. We use a unified scene graph representation for acceleration techniques. In preprocessing, we subdivide large objects, and build a BVH clustering hierarchy. We make use of a novel adaptive sampling method to generate LOD models: AdaptiveVoxels. The AdaptiveVoxels reduces the preprocessing cost and our outof-core rendering algorithm improves rendering efficiency. We have implemented our algorithm on a desktop PC. We can render massive CAD and isosurface models, consisting of hundreds of millions of triangles interactively with little loss in image quality.

Virtual Reality, 2003

Thecreationof completereconstructionsof populatedurbanenvironmentsaretechnically difficult tasks primarily due to economic constraints in the modeling phase as complex models need to keep renderingaspects in mind in orderto warrantinteractive renderingspeeds.Specializedmodelling tools, which exploit knowledgeof the typesof object being modelled by working in the application domain, can be used to create appealing virtual reconstruc- tions quickly. At the same time, the structural information from

Advances in real-time graphics research and the increasing power of mainstream GPUs have resulted in an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for rendering complex virtual worlds at interactive rates. Every year the latest video games display a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms resulting in ground-breaking 3D graphics that push the visual boundaries of interactive experience.