Procedural Modelling of Cities Implemented as a Blender Plug-In Kevin Mullane Supervisors: Kevin Glass and Shaun Bangay

Project Aims To procedurally generate an urban environment or city for use in the “Text-to- Scene” project. Implementation of this modelling process as a plug-in for the Blender 3D modelling package

Background Text-To-Scene –Current project of the Virtual Reality Special Interest Group at Rhodes University –Aims to generate interactive 3D environments based on textual descriptions.

Background Blender –Open Source 3D Modelling Package –Implements a Python interface –Allows for the generation of scenes using Python Scripts

Background Procedural Modelling Of Cities –Procedural Modeling of Cities [Parish and Müller, 2001] –Procedural Modeling of Buildings [Haegler et al. 2006]

Procedural Modelling of Cities Two major tasks to be implemented –Road Network Generation –Building Footprint Extrusion

Road Network Generation Creation of complex network of splines –Lines form basis for roads – Gaps between form basis for city blocks

Division into Lots Network of splines is divided into city blocks and building footprints

Building Extrusion Buildings based on the combination and extrusion of basic shape primitives

Expected Outcomes A simple plug-in for Blender which can be easily called from the Text-to-Scene system. The procedural generation of a complex and visually diverse urban city environment.

Possible Extensions This project will focus on producing cities of one style or genre and could possibly be extended to encompass varying styles and genres. The implementation of further optional parameters to allow the Text-to-Scene system greater control over the city produced.

Questions?