Modeling Urban Environments from Geospatial Data

Abstract

In game development there is often the need to generate realistic urban environments, i.e. 3D virtual environments that replicate existing urban areas. However, modeling such spaces using traditional techniques is both too slow and too expensive. A good solution is the use of procedural modeling techniques to automate the process. However these techniques require large amounts of geospatial data, which are usually stored in Geographic Information Systems (GIS).This paper presents a pipeline for the integration of both geometric and semantic data from GIS data sources into procedural modeling techniques used for the generation of 3D virtual urban environments. GIS data can already be used in procedural modeling tools but these do not provide an easy and uniform way to incorporate semantic information from different data sources. To solve this problem, the proposed pipeline is capable of transforming semantic and geometric information from different sources into 3D environments that replicate specific urban areas.