Procedural Modeling
Eric Galin
Institut de la Communication
Université Lumière Lyon 2, France
Phone: (33) 4 72 71 60 74
Fax: (33) 4 72 71 08 52
e-mail: eric.galin@liris.cnrs.fr
Modeling and Generating Realistic Worlds
GENESIS
Recent software
Arches
Arches is a global framework for authoring 3D terrains.
Maya
Our own Maya library is a complete framework for manipulating complex models created from procedural content techniques. It is designed for handling instances, and is used as an modeling interface prior to exporting our models to Maya and Mental Ray for rendering.
Earlier frameworks
BlobTree
The BlobTree framework is a complete implementation of the BlobTree model. It implements the many features that have been published from 1996 to 2004.
Core
The Core library provides a simple and efficient implementation of the many core classes that are needed in modeling and image synthesis.
Package
The following package includes the include files of the Core and Maya libraries, the compiled libraries and a starting example project.
Core
The Core library groups several fundamental classes related to mathematics and geometry.
Maya
The Maya library is a complete framework for manipulating complex models created from procedural content techniques. In provides a simple representation for meshes and can be used as an interface between applications and the OpenGL library.
Arches
Arches is a complete framework for authoring 3D terrains. A terrain is defined as a two dimensional grid of material stacks. A material stack is defined as an array of material layers that are characterized by their thickness and the corresponding material type. Our framework currently handles air, water, snow, sand, bedrock, and rocks. Overhangs, arches and caves can be easily created by inserting an air layer between two bedrock layers.
This data-structure is both computationally efficient and less memory demanding than a voxel decomposition of space. It can be used to store complex 3D terrains with many different and complex geological features such as caves, cliffs and arches with an effective resolution exceeding 6 billion voxels with less than 21 megabytes.
The final surface of the terrain is generated as a convolution surface which smooths the discrete material layer stack. The implicit representation enables us to generate a continuous surface and to create a triangle mesh representation easily.