Procedural Generation of Natural Environments with Restrictions

Abstract

Natural environments are a very important part of virtual worlds, both for video games and for simulators, but their manual creation can be a very expensive job. The procedural creation of these, allows to generate them easily and quickly, although there is no way to control the final result quickly and accurately. The purpose of this work is to present a new method of creation, that allows the procedural generation of a natural environment for applications such as rail shooter. The vegetation of the natural environment will be placed automatically along the area of the route. The method presented, is based on establishing on the ground a grid of points which are assigned a random function of probability of appearance of each species based on Perlin noise. In addition, the method draws from the heightmap the values necessary to distribute the natural elements. These values are combined along the distance of the route and next to a noise distribution, thus obtaining placement patterns that have a greater probability of occurrence in favorable points of the map and near the route. The results show that the method allows the procedural generation of these environments for any heightmap, also focusing the realism and the placement of the natural elements in the user visualization zone.