S.: Render-Time Procedural Per-Pixel Geometry Generation

Figure 1: Per-pixel generation of procedural facade details: we propose a compact and generic solution for generating and rendering procedural building models featuring both macroscopic (b) and microscopic (c) details. Our method can be used to generate and render massive cities (a), as well as custom-shaped buildings (d). We introduce procedural geometry mapping and ray-dependent grammar development for fast and scalable render-time generation of procedural geometric details on graphics hardware. By lever-aging the properties of the widely used split grammars, we re-place geometry generation by lazy per-pixel grammar development. This approach drastically reduces the memory costs while implic-itly concentrating the computations on objects spanning large areas in image space. Starting with a building footprint, the bounding volume of each facade is projected towards the viewer. For each pixel we lazily develop the grammar describing the facade and in-tersect the potentially visible split rules and terminal shapes. Fur-ther geometric details are added using normal and relief mapping in terminal space. Our approach also supports the computation of per-pixel self shadowing on facades for high visual quality. We demonstrate interactive performance even when generating and tun-ing large cityscapes comprising thousands of facades. The method is generalized to arbitrary mesh-based shapes to provide full artis-tic control over the generation of the procedural elements, making it also usable outside the context of urban modeling