Procedural Urban Forestry
This addresses the challenge of creating realistic virtual urban environments for applications like gaming, simulation, and urban planning, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing procedural generation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of realistically placing vegetation in virtual urban scenes by introducing procedural placement models (PPMs) that are sensitive to city geometry and structural zones, enabling the generation of complex 3D vegetation in large-scale city scenes and close-ups, with validation through a perceptual user study.
The placement of vegetation plays a central role in the realism of virtual scenes. We introduce procedural placement models (PPMs) for vegetation in urban layouts. PPMs are environmentally sensitive to city geometry and allow identifying plausible plant positions based on structural and functional zones in an urban layout. PPMs can either be directly used by defining their parameters or can be learned from satellite images and land register data. Together with approaches for generating buildings and trees, this allows us to populate urban landscapes with complex 3D vegetation. The effectiveness of our framework is shown through examples of large-scale city scenes and close-ups of individually grown tree models; we also validate it by a perceptual user study.