: Screenshots from our real-time editor for grammar-based procedural architecture. Left: Visual editing of grammar rules. Middle left: Direct dragging of the red ground-plan vertex and modifying the height with a slider creates the building on the middle right. While dragging, the building is updated instantly. Right: Editing is possible at multiple levels, here the high-level shell of a building is modified. We introduce a real-time interactive visual editing paradigm for shape grammars, allowing the creation of rulebases from scratch without text file editing. In previous work, shape-grammar based procedural techniques were successfully applied to the creation of architectural models. However, those methods are text based, and may therefore be difficult to use for artists with little computer science background. Therefore the goal was to enable a visual workflow combining the power of shape grammars with traditional modeling techniques. We extend previous shape grammar approaches by providing direct and persistent local control over the generated instances, avoiding the combinatorial explosion of grammar rules for modifications that should not affect all instances. The resulting visual editor is flexible: All elements of a complex state-of-the-art grammar can be created and modified visually.
Lipp et al. REF , for example, introduce a visual frontend to define shape grammars interactively with direct visual editing.
Interactive visual editing of grammars for procedural architecture
SIGGRAPH '08
Computer Science