Procedural Methods for the Modelling and Simulation of Large Environments

My doctoral work is in the field of computer graphics. I’m interested in the application of procedural methods to creating large scale content — content the size of a city or larger. Specifically, I’m interested in techniques for combining procedurally generated content with traditional content, which is an area that grows in importance as procedural methods are more heavily relied upon.

For instance, consider a game in which a hotspot for the player may be created by artists, and the surrounding areas procedurally generated. My interest lies in how one can create the procedural models in such a way that the procedure has an awareness of the pre-generated content, and seamlessly integrates the content from the two domains.

A more complex example comes from city modelling. Here, one may have little more than a road network and aerial photography with which to construct a city model. One would want to seamlessly blend this minimal real-life data with procedurally generated data in some parsimonious way.

My doctoral work is still in its early stages. Here you can find a copy of my PhD proposal that I’ve submitted to the department. I’m supervised by Dr. James Gain.