Urban Brush: Intuitive and Controllable Urban Layout Editing

Xiaochen Zhou (1) , Pascal Chang (2) , Marie-Paule Cani (2) , Bedrich Benes (3)

1 Purdue University [West Lafayette]
2 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]
3 Department of Computer Science [Purdue]

We present a novel method for authoring landscapes with flora and fauna while considering their mutual interactions. Our algorithm outputs a steady-state ecosystem in the form of density maps for each species, their daily circuits, and a modified terrain with eroded trails from a terrain, climatic conditions, and species with related biological information. We introduce the Resource Access Graph, a new data structure that encodes both interactions between food chain levels and animals traveling between resources over the terrain. A novel competition algorithm operating on this data progressively computes a steady-state solution up the food chain, from plants to carnivores. The user can explore the resulting landscape, where plants and animals are instantiated on the fly, and interactively edit it by over-painting the maps. Our results show that our system enables the authoring of consistent landscapes where the impact of wildlife is visible through animated animals, clearings in the vegetation, and eroded trails. We provide quantitative validation with existing ecosystems and a user-study with expert paleontologist end-users, showing that our system enables them to author and compare different ecosystems illustrating climate changes over the same terrain while enabling relevant visual immersion into consistent landscapes.

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Xiaochen Zhou, Pascal Chang, Marie-Paule Cani, Bedrich Benes. Urban Brush: Intuitive and Controllable Urban Layout Editing. UIST '21: The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Oct 2021, Virtual Event, United States. pp.796-814, ⟨10.1145/3472749.3474787⟩. ⟨hal-03431693⟩