Procedural Generation of Parcels in Urban Modeling - Eurographics 2012

Carlos A. Vanegas, Tom Kelly, Basil Weber, Jan Halatsch, Daniel G. Aliaga, Pascal Muller

Esri R&D Center Zurich, Switzerland
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, USA University of Glasgow, UK
ETH Zurich, Switzerland

We present a method for interactive procedural generation of parcels within the urban modeling pipeline. Our approach performs a partitioning of the interior of city blocks using user-specified subdivision attributes and style parameters. Moreover, our method is both robust and persistent in the sense of being able to map individual parcels from before an edit operation to after an edit operation - this enables transferring most, if not all, customizations despite small to large-scale interactive editing operations. The guidelines guarantee that the resulting subdivisions are functionally and geometrically plausible for subsequent building modeling and construction. Our results include visual and statistical comparisons that demonstrate how the parcel configurations created by our method can closely resemble those found in real-world cities of a large variety of styles. By directly addressing the block subdivision problem, we intend to increase the editability and realism of the urban modeling pipeline and to become a standard in parcel generation for future urban modeling methods.