A Survey on Procedural Modelling for Virtual Worlds

TLDR

Procedural modelling is a semi‑automatic content generation technique that compresses data and can produce a wide variety of detailed virtual environments with minimal human intervention, making it popular in movies, games, and simulations. This survey examines procedural methods for generating virtual world features—such as terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings, and cities—while emphasizing the intuitive control and interactivity that designers and artists require. The authors analyze procedural approaches that enable designers to intuitively manipulate and interact with the generated content. The survey highlights recent promising research results but notes that procedural methods have yet to achieve widespread acceptance among non‑technical creative professionals, and it discusses key challenges that must be addressed.

Abstract

Abstract Procedural modelling deals with (semi‐)automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modelling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non‐technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modelling.