Imaginative procedural modeling : automated 3D generation and rendering of stylized building designs

Abstract

The entertainment industry relies fairly heavily on computer-generated imagery to depict built environments in current films, video games, and other forms of simulated reality. These often involve highly complex geometries that take a long time to hand-model and are too difficult or costly for many productions' rendering capacities, both in computational costs as well as time. Procedural modeling and the automation of these geometries is one option to solve these problems. Many modeling programs involve a script or procedural modeling component. This thesis explores the use of CityEngine, a commercially available software that is specialized to generate geometries for buildings in urban environments. By using the CGA Shape Grammar built into CityEngine, this project seeks to generate geometries based on complex architectural precedents using a procedural modeling system based on shape grammar and computational design principles. Results are generated and discussed, as well as applications and future work.