Procedural Modelling

Procedural modeling is an umbrella term for a number of techniques in computer graphics to create 3D models and textures from sets of rules. Traditionally, 3D objects and virtual worlds are defined by lists of geometric primitives: cubes and spheres in a CSG tree, NURBS patches, a set of implicit functions, a soup of triangles, or just a cloud of points. The term 'procedural modeling' describes a paradigm change in shape description: the generalization from objects to operations: A shape is described by a sequence of processing steps, rather than just the end result of applying operations. Shape design becomes rule design. We investigate ways on extending the current state of the art of procedural modelling techniques to describe a wider range of shapes efficiently using rule based design.