Procedural generation of villages on arbitrary terrains

Although procedural modeling of cities has attracted a lot of attention for the past decade, populating arbitrary landscapes with non-urban settlements remains an open problem. In this work, we focus on the modeling of small, European villages that took benefit of terrain features to settle in safe, sunny or simply convenient places. We introduce a three step procedural generation method. First, an iterative process based on interest maps is used to progressively generate settlement seeds and the roads that connect them. The fact that a new road attracts settlers while a new house often leads to some extension of the road network is taken into account. Then, an anisotropic conquest method is introduced to segment the land into parcels around settlement seeds. Finally, we introduce open shape grammar to generate 3D geometry that adapts to the local slope. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by generating different kinds of village on arbitrary terrains, from a mountain hamlet to a fisherman village, and validate through comparison with real data.