Huge Parametric Digital Worlds – HDWorlds

Producing massive 3D models representing large scale virtual worlds with a high level of details is a major challenge in computer graphics. In industry as well, there is a strong demand for providing efficient algorithms to reduce manual authoring tasks. Procedural modeling and texturing (PMT) is known to provide a good solution to the scalability problem: it has excellent compression properties, it can produce large amounts of data with low user efforts and, by using stochastic processes, it can produce almost infinite varieties of data, based on a reduced set of parameters. In spite of all of these advantages, PMT still does not offer a suitable alternative to manual modeling, mainly because it is difficult to control, and because ensuring realism at various scales is a hard task.

The goal of this research is to overcome these limitations so as to synthesize huge detailed scenes using procedural modeling. The novelty of our approach is to develop multi-scale procedural techniques for generating both the shape (geometry) and the appearance (texture) of objects with different levels of details. To improve realism we take into account the changes of appearance of objects throughout time, the impact of external environment, as well as real world data (photographs). The efficiency of our new models will be demonstrated by the creation of large realistic landscapes, that will be editable at interactive rates by using prototype tools.