Artist-Controlled Modeling of Urban Environments DIPLOMARBEIT zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Diplom-Ingenieur

Creating large-scale virtual environments for interactive applications such as computer games poses a demanding challenge for computer graphics. Urban environments are usually hand-crafted by artists using commercial 3D modeling software. For today’s detail-rich games, this becomes less and less feasible. Procedural modeling techniques strive to help artists to create virtual worlds in less time. In this thesis, I present a system that helps artists and game designers to plan, layout and model urban environments for games and other media. Methods are described to create street networks manually and procedurally and to edit them interactively at any time in the development process. A stable street tessellation technique is employed that is able to represent street segments as well as crossings connecting an arbitrary number of streets and that adapts to the underlying terrain. Furthermore, I propose a constraint based method to automatically populate a city with buildings from a set o