Interactive Creation of Virtual Worlds Using Procedural Sketching

Abstract

Procedural modelling is an attractive alternative to cut down the costs of manual content creation for virtual worlds. We discuss our declarative modelling approach to the creation of 3D virtual worlds, which integrates a variety of procedural techniques in order to enable a non-specialist user to interactively create a complete 3D virtual world in minutes. In particular, we introduce procedural sketching, a novel paradigm which allows designers to quickly specify and see the effects of their procedural modelling operations, and describe its main features as implemented in our prototype system SketchaWorld. Two main interaction modes are described, for specifying the landscape and terrain features, respectively. Our approach automatically fits all generated terrain features with their surroundings, for example by smoothing out rough terrain for roads, or creating a bridge to cross a river. It is concluded that this approach provides designers with the productivity gain of procedural methods, while still allowing for fine user control and actively supporting iterative modelling.