Procedural Urban Forestry

TL;DR

This paper presents procedural placement models for realistic vegetation in urban scenes, enabling automatic, environmentally sensitive, and data-driven population of complex 3D urban landscapes with vegetation.

Contribution

It introduces novel procedural placement models that adapt to city geometry and can be learned from satellite and land data for urban vegetation placement.

Findings

Effective in large-scale city scene generation

Validated through perceptual user study

Enables data-driven urban vegetation modeling

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 can be learned from satellite images and land register data. Together with approaches for generating buildings and trees, this allows us to populate urban landscapes with complex 3D vegetation. The effectiveness of our framework is shown through examples of large-scale city scenes and close-ups of individually grown tree models; we also validate it by a perceptual user study.