Thursday 22 May 2008

New issue of IEEE CG&A journal out, special issue on urban modelling

The latest issue of the very respected IEEE Computer Graphics And Applications journal is dedicated to urban modelling issues. As computer graphics simulations of our natural world continue to improve, effectively depicting our human environment is becoming increasingly important. Our everyday world consists not simply of basic materials and objects, but also of the things we make from them. Our cities are simultaneously the most complex and the most common of these things. To automate city modeling, researchers are beginning to revive research on procedural modeling, simulating not only natural processes but the human processes that shape our urban environment. This special issue captures a good snapshot of work in this emerging area.

Articles in the issue, a must IMO for anyone remotely interested in the urban modelling area, include a tutorial by Watson and colleagues which surveys prior work and studies in using procedural urban modeling. Chang and colleagues present methods for controlling the complexity in urban environments while Aliaga and colleagues describe a new system for editing urban layouts.

Mendez and colleagues describe a system for visualizing the underground infrastructure that all urban residents rely on, but most know so little about. Finkenzeller describes a method for modeling building facades, floor plans, and roofs that segments modeling into a manual sketch of a rough shape and a procedural elaboration of that shape using a certain style. Finally, Weber’s work describes how to animate procedurally generated trees in real time.

You can check out this issue of the journal at the following link: http://www.computer.org/portal/site/cga/index.jsp

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