filename     : parish.pdf	
entry        : inproceedings
pages        : to appear
year         : 2001
title        : Procedural Modeling of Cities
author       : Yoav I. H. Parish, Pascal Müller
booktitle    : SIGGRAPH 2001 Proceedings, Los Angeles CA, August 2001
editor       : 
publisher    : 
language     : English
month        : August
keywords     : L-system, software design, developmental mod-els, modeling, urban development, architecture
abstract     :
Modeling a city poses a number of problems to computer graphics. Every urban area has a transportation network that follows population and environmental influences, and often a superimposed pattern plan. The buildings appearances follow historical, aesthetic and statutory rules. To create a virtual city, a roadmap has to be designed and a large number of buildings need to be generated. We propose a system using a procedural approach based on L-systems to model cities. From various image maps given as input, such as land-water boundaries and population density, our system generates a system of highways and streets, divides the land into lots, and creates the appropriate geometry for the buildings on the respective allotments. For the creation of a city street map, L-systems have been extended with methods that allow the consideration of global goals and local constraints and reduce the complexity of the production rules. An L-system that generates geometry and a texturing system based on texture elements and procedural methods compose the buildings.