Procedural 3D Modeling of Cityscapes

The problem of modeling large-scale virtual urban environments has remained challenging for computer graphics researchers and urban planners. Cities are difficult to model in detail, since they hold diverse and complex geometries. Building large-scale 3D city models by means of photogrammetric reconstruction is a time and resource intensive, often semi-automatic process and does not provide data for modeling future cityscapes. Recently, a lot of research in the area of comuter graphics has been dedicated to developing alternative modeling techniques. This survey provides an overview of state-of-the-art procedural modeling techniques for generating virtual cities. Research projects using grammar-based and agent-based models, statistical approaches, and real-time procedural modeling techniques are presented and discussed.