Interactive Urban Map Design with Template and Parameterization

Cities are the largest human artifacts and appear often in digital entertainment. To create a virtual city, a roadmap has to be designed and a large number of buildings need to be generated. In this paper, we describe a method for procedurally generating urban map using template based techniques and parameterization algorithms in an interactive way. Our system is designed to allow developers hands on interactive control over the generation process. It can be controlled by a set of parameters that users can alter numerically or by manually operation in order to constrain and guide the results to fit a particular application's need. We achieve this by providing an interface allowing the user to directly manipulate geometric elements such as road intersection nodes and angle range between road segments, and to directly control many aspects of the procedural generation. The results are updated in real time, thus facilitating an interactive design process.