AutoBiomes: procedural generation of multi-biome landscapes
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
AutoBiomes: procedural generation of multi-biome landscapes Roland Fischer1
· Philipp Dittmann1 · René Weller1 · Gabriel Zachmann1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Advances in computer technology and increasing usage of computer graphics in a broad field of applications lead to rapidly rising demands regarding size and detail of virtual landscapes. Manually creating huge, realistic looking terrains and populating them densely with assets is an expensive and laborious task. In consequence, (semi-)automatic procedural terrain generation is a popular method to reduce the amount of manual work. However, such methods are usually highly specialized for certain terrain types and especially the procedural generation of landscapes composed of different biomes is a scarcely explored topic. We present a novel system, called AutoBiomes, which is capable of efficiently creating vast terrains with plausible biome distributions and therefore different spatial characteristics. The main idea is to combine several synthetic procedural terrain generation techniques with digital elevation models (DEMs) and a simplified climate simulation. Moreover, we include an easy-to-use asset placement component which creates complex multi-object distributions. Our system relies on a pipeline approach with a major focus on usability. Our results show that our system allows the fast creation of realistic looking terrains. Keywords Procedural content generation · Terrain generation · Virtual worlds · Biomes · Climate simulation · Digital elevation models
1 Introduction The ever-rising demand for bigger and more complex virtual 3D worlds poses a challenge for designers to create and fill them with life. There is a broad range of applications for huge and realistic 3D landscapes, e.g., computer games, movies and simulations. With the rising accessibility of head-mounted displays (HMDs), there is also an increasing opportunity to explore these worlds in virtual reality in a more immersive environment. Generating these worlds manually is a laborious and expensive task [1]; therefore, extensive research was done in the field of procedural terrain generation (PTG). Yet it remains an important topic, as there is still much potential for improvement. Numerous algorithms for PTG have been proposed which can be roughly
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Roland Fischer [email protected] Philipp Dittmann [email protected] René Weller [email protected] Gabriel Zachmann [email protected]
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categorized into three types: synthetic, physics-based and example-based approaches [7,9]. Each of these approaches comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Most of the currently used methods and terrain generators follow one of the mentioned approaches and emphasize only on a single, very specific use case. Hence, they are hardly capable of satisfying a broader set of requirements [20]. In consequence, it remains a challenge to create a system with a reasonable compromise of the four most essential but mutually contradictory requirements: realism, p
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