Integrating procedural generation and manual editing of virtual worlds

Because of the increasing detail and size of virtual worlds, designers are more and more urged to consider employing procedural methods to alleviate part of their modeling work. However, such methods are often unintuitive to use, dicult to integrate, and provide little user control, making their application far from straightforward. In our declarative modeling approach, designers are provided with a more productive and simpli ed virtual world modeling work ow that matches better with their iterative way of working. Using interactive procedural sketching, they can quickly layout a virtual world, while having proper user control at the level of large terrain features. However, in practice, designers require a ner level of control. Integrating procedural techniques with manual editing in an iterative modeling work ow is an important topic that has remained relatively unaddressed until now. This paper identi es challenges of this integration and discusses approaches to combine these methods in such a way that designers can freely mix them, while the virtual world model is kept consistent during all modi cations. We conclude that overcoming the challenges mentioned, for example in a declarative modeling context, is instrumental to achieve the much desired adoption of procedural modeling in mainstream virtual world modeling.

@InProceedings { STDB10d,
  author       = "Smelik, Ruben M. and Tutenel, Tim and Kraker, Klaas Jan de  and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Integrating procedural generation and manual editing of virtual worlds",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of PCG 2010 - workshop on Procedural Content Generation for Games, co-located with the Fifth
                  International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "jun",
  year         = "2010",
  address      = "Monterey, CA",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2010/STDB10d"
}