Automatic Addition of Physics Components to Procedural Content

Baxter, Richard and Crumley, Zacharia and Neeser, Rudolph and Gain, James (2010) Automatic Addition of Physics Components to Procedural Content, Proceedings of Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, Visualisation and Interaction in Africa (Afrigraph 2010), 21-23 June 2010, Franchhoek, South Africa, 101-110, ACM Press.

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Abstract

While the field of procedural content generation is growing, there has been somewhat less work on developing procedural methods to animate these models. We present a technique for generating procedural models of trees and buildings via formal grammars (L-Systems and wall grammars) that are ready to be animated using physical simulation. The grammars and their interpretations are augmented to provide direct control over the physical animation, by, for example, specifying object mass and the joint stiffness. Example animations produced by our system include trees swaying in a gentle wind or being rocked by a gale, and buildings collapsing, imploding or exploding. In user testing, we had test subjects (n = 20) compare our animations with video of trees and buildings undergoing similar effects, as well as with animations in games that they have played. Results show that our animations appear physically accurate with a few minor instances of unrealistic behaviour. Users considered the animations to be more realistic than those used in current video games.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Subjects:	Computing methodologies > Computer graphics
Date Deposited:	01 Dec 2010
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:33
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/648

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