Interactive Authoring of 3D Shapes Represented as Programs

Abstract

Although hardware and techniques have considerably improved over the years at handling heavy content, digital 3D creation remains fairly complex, partly because the bottleneck also lies in the cognitive load imposed over the designers. A recent shift to higher-order representation of shapes, encoding them as computer programs that generate their geometry, enables creation pipelines that better manage the cognitive load, but this also comes with its own sources of friction. We study in this thesis new challenges and opportunities introduced by program-based representations of 3D shapes in the context of digital content authoring.

We investigate ways for the interaction with the shapes to remain as much as possible in 3D space, rather than operating on abstract symbols in program space. This includes both assisting the creation of the program, by allowing manipulation in 3D space while still ensuring a good generalization upon changes of the free variables of the program, and helping one to tune these variables by enabling direct manipulation of the output of the program.

We explore diversity of program-based representations, focusing various paradigms of visual programming interfaces, from the imperative directed acyclic graphs (DAG) to the declarative Wang tiles, through more hybrid approaches. In all cases we study shape programs that evaluate at interactive rate, so that they fit in a creation process, and we push this by studying synergies of program-based representations with real time rendering pipelines.

We enable the use of direct manipulation methods on DAG output thanks to automated rewriting rules and a non-linear filtering of differential data. We help the creation of imperative shape programs by turning geometric selection into semantic queries and of declarative programs by proposing an interface-first editing scheme for authoring 3D content in Wang tiles. We extend tiling engines to handle continuous tile parameters and arbitrary slot graphs, and to suggest new tiles to add to the set. We blend shape programs into the visual feedback loop by delegating tile content evaluation to the real-time rendering pipeline or exploiting the program's semantics to drive an impostor-based level-of-details system.

Overall, our series of contributions aims at leveraging program-based representations of shapes to make the process of authoring 3D digital scenes more of an artistic act and less of a technical task.