GardenDesigner: Encoding Aesthetic Principles into Jiangnan Garden Construction via a Chain of Agents

TL;DR

GardenDesigner is a framework that encodes aesthetic principles and uses a chain of procedural agents to efficiently generate diverse, aesthetically pleasing Jiangnan gardens for digital applications, enabling non-experts to create gardens via text input.

Contribution

It introduces a novel procedural modeling framework with agents encoding aesthetic principles and an interactive Unity interface for non-experts to construct Jiangnan gardens quickly.

Findings

Generated gardens are diverse and aesthetically pleasing.

Human evaluations confirm the quality of the generated gardens.

Non-experts can construct gardens within one minute using text input.

Abstract

Jiangnan gardens, a prominent style of Chinese classical gardens, hold great potential as digital assets for film and game production and digital tourism. However, manual modeling of Jiangnan gardens heavily relies on expert experience for layout design and asset creation, making the process time-consuming. To address this gap, we propose GardenDesigner, a novel framework that encodes aesthetic principles for Jiangnan garden construction and integrates a chain of agents based on procedural modeling. The water-centric terrain and explorative pathway rules are applied by terrain distribution and road generation agents. Selection and spatial layout of garden assets follow the aesthetic and cultural constraints. Consequently, we propose asset selection and layout optimization agents to select and arrange objects for each area in the garden. Additionally, we introduce GardenVerse for Jiangnan garden construction, including expert-annotated garden knowledge to enhance the asset arrangement process. To enable interaction and editing, we develop an interactive interface and tools in Unity, in which non-expert users can construct Jiangnan gardens via text input within one minute. Experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that GardenDesigner can generate diverse and aesthetically pleasing Jiangnan gardens. Project page is available at https://monad-cube.github.io/GardenDesigner.