Procedural Urban Forestry

TILL NIESE, Soren Pirk, Matthias Albrecht, Bedrich Benes, Oliver Deussen

Abstract:

The placement of vegetation plays a central role in the realism of virtual
scenes. We introduce procedural placement models (PPMs) for vegetation
in urban layouts. PPMs are environmentally sensitive to city geometry and
allow identifying plausible plant positions based on structural and functional zones in an urban layout. PPMs can either be directly used by defining their parameters or learned from satellite images and land register data.
This allows us to populate urban landscapes with complex 3D vegetation
and enhance existing approaches for generating urban landscapes. Our framework’s effectiveness is shown through examples of large-scale city
scenes and close-ups of individually grown tree models. We validate the
results generated with our framework with a perceptual user study and its
usability based on urban scene design sessions with expert users.