City Sketching

Abstract

Procedural methods offer an automated means of generating complex cityscapes, incorporating the placement of park areas and the layout of roads, plots and buildings. Unfortunately, existing interfaces to procedural city systems tend to either focus on a single aspect of city layout (such as the road network) ignoring interaction with other elements (such as building dimensions) or expect numeric input with little visual feedback, short of the completed city, which may take up to several minutes to generate. In this paper we present an interface to procedural city generation, which, through a combination of sketching and gestural input, enables users to specify different land usage (parkland, commercial, residential and industrial), and control the geometric attributes of roads, plots and buildings. Importantly, the inter-relationship of these elements is pre-visualized so that their impact on the final city layout can be predicted. Once generated, further editing, for instance shaping the city skyline or redrawing individual roads, is supported. In general, City Sketching provides a powerful and intuitive interface for designing complex urban layouts.