Data-guided Authoring of Procedural Models of Shapes

Abstract

Procedural models enable the generation of a large amount of diverse shapes by varying the parameters of the model. However, writing a procedural model for replicating a collection of reference shapes is difficult, requiring much inspection of the original and replicated shapes during the development of the model. In this paper, we introduce a data-guided method for aiding a programmer in creating a procedural model to replicate a collection of reference shapes. The user starts by writing an initial procedural model, and the system automatically predicts the model parameters for reference shapes, also grouping shapes by how well they are approximated by the current procedural model. The user can then update the procedural model based on the given feedback and iterate the process. Our system thus automates the tedious process of discovering the parameters that replicate reference shapes, allowing the programmer to focus on designing the high-level rules that generate the shapes. We demonstrate through qualitative examples and a user study that our method is able to speed up the development time for creating procedural models of 2D and 3D man-made shapes.