Visual Editor for Procedural Modelling of Architectural Structures

Creation of high-quality 3D-models is an important task in many areas. With the development of modern computer graphics industry there emerged a need in significant amounts of high-quality assets, and hence simple and fast yet effective and reliable techniques of generating content. One of the promising and rapidly developing research fields is procedural modelling due to the flexibility and simplicity it delivers comparing to the traditional modelling methods. Since the time the idea of using procedural modelling for architectural design purposes was first introduced, a few specific grammar languages has been developed, the most popular and widely-used of them being CGA (2006) and CGA++ (2015). For CGA there have been created some visual editors, significantly simplifying the usage of grammar-based approach and allowing to use it in visual modelling. CGA++ is supposed to be an advanced and enhanced version of CGA, so the primary aims of this work were exploring the possibilities of implementing CGA++ grammar in terms of visual design and developing a tool for architectural structures modelling, combining the simplicity and familiarity of traditional 3D-modelling controls with the possibilities procedural modelling approach provides, which might hypothetically significantly reduce both the time and the costs spent on model creating in many related areas. The editor is expected to be available either as a standalone desktop application or be embeddable into existing modelling environments, such as game engines so that it could be used directly as a module of a larger world-building system, or both. Keywords: procedural modelling, architecture, grammar-based modelling, computer-aided design, unity3d