Architectural Profiles

Architectural Profiles: Procedural Content Generation using Tile-based Architectural Profiles

van Aanholt, Levi (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Bidarra, A.R. (mentor)
Hildebrandt, K.A. (graduation committee)
Visser, E. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

2020-08-28

Procedural content generation (PCG) for architecture is widely used in a variety of digital media, most notably in games. However, such methods are often limited in their expressive range, and require considerable technical knowledge to create non-trivial architectural structures. We present a novel tile-based PCG approach for generating architecture, that proposes the use of architectural profiles, a declarative characterization of architectural typology, within a generic tile solving framework. An architectural profile consists of a set of tiles, representing atomic architectural building blocks, and a set of declarative constraints and rules, specifying which conditions a tile configuration has to satisfy to be valid. These conditions are translated into logic constraints, and used by a tile solver to control tile placement in a bottom-up manner. Eventually, each valid model output by the solver is a representative instance of its architectural profile. We describe an implementation of this approach with Answer Set Programming, using an off-the-shelf constraint solver for model generation. We performed an expressive range analysis, and concluded that our declarative method is quite controllable and can be steered over a broad range of architectural structures, regarding density and repetitiveness. Due to this expressive range and control, our tile-based method is very suitable for the customized development of urban environments for games. We also explore the adaptability of architectural profiles by application on pre-existing terrains.

Procedural Content Generation
Architecture
Tile Solving
Expressive Range Analysis
Settlement
Design methodology
architectural typology

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:51f3e8ba-e5f4-46f4-af73-f34f4fbdffa0

Student theses

master thesis

© 2020 Levi van Aanholt