Shrinking City Layouts

Information

• Publication Type: Journal Paper (without talk)
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • Rendering and Modeling
• Date: February 2020
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2019.11.004
• ISSN: 0097-8493
• Journal: Computers & Graphics
• Open Access: no
• Volume: 86
• Pages: 15 – 26
• Keywords: procedural modeling, computer games

Abstract

One important use of realistic city environments is in the video game industry. When a company works on a game whose action occurs in a real-world environment, a team of designers usually creates a simplified model of the real city. In particular, the resulting city is desired to be smaller in extent to increase playability and fun, avoiding long walks and “boring” neighborhoods. This is manual work, usually started from scratch, where the first step is to take the original city map as input, and from it create the street network of the final city, removing insignificant streets and bringing important places closer together in the process. This first draft of the city street network is like a kind of skeleton with the most important places connected, from which the artist can (and should) start working until the desired result is obtained. In this paper, we propose a solution to automatically generate such a first simplified street network draft. This is achieved by using the well-established seam-carving technique applied to a sckeleton of the city layout, built with the important landmarks and streets of the city. The output that our process provides is a street network that reduces the city area as much as the designer wants, preserving landmarks and key streets, while keeping the relative positions between them. For this, we run a shrinking process that reduces the area in an irregular way, prioritizing the removal of areas of less importance. This way, we achieve a smaller city but retain the essence of the real-world one. To further help the designer, we also present an automatic filling algorithm that adds unimportant streets to the shrunken skeleton.

Additional Files and Images

Weblinks

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2019.11.004

BibTeX

@article{PUEYO-2019-SCL,
  title =      "Shrinking City Layouts",
  author =     "Oriol Pueyo and Albert Sabria and Xavier Pueyo and Michael
               Wimmer and Gustavo Patow",
  year =       "2020",
  abstract =   "One important use of realistic city environments is in the
               video game industry. When a company works on a game whose
               action occurs in a real-world environment, a team of
               designers usually creates a simplified model of the real
               city. In particular, the resulting city is desired to be
               smaller in extent to increase playability and fun, avoiding
               long walks and “boring” neighborhoods. This is manual
               work, usually started from scratch, where the first step is
               to take the original city map as input, and from it create
               the street network of the final city, removing insignificant
               streets and bringing important places closer together in the
               process. This first draft of the city street network is like
               a kind of skeleton with the most important places connected,
               from which the artist can (and should) start working until
               the desired result is obtained. In this paper, we propose a
               solution to automatically generate such a first simplified
               street network draft. This is achieved by using the
               well-established seam-carving technique applied to a
               sckeleton of the city layout, built with the important
               landmarks and streets of the city. The output that our
               process provides is a street network that reduces the city
               area as much as the designer wants, preserving landmarks and
               key streets, while keeping the relative positions between
               them. For this, we run a shrinking process that reduces the
               area in an irregular way, prioritizing the removal of areas
               of less importance. This way, we achieve a smaller city but
               retain the essence of the real-world one. To further help
               the designer, we also present an automatic filling algorithm
               that adds unimportant streets to the shrunken skeleton.",
  month =      feb,
  doi =        "10.1016/j.cag.2019.11.004",
  issn =       "0097-8493",
  journal =    "Computers & Graphics",
  volume =     "86",
  pages =      "15--26",
  keywords =   "procedural modeling, computer games",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2020/PUEYO-2019-SCL/",
}