GLObal Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS) for city- and street- scale urban simulations: Development and first applications

Kamath, Harsh; Singh, Manmeet; Malviya, Neetiraj; Martilli, Alberto; He, Liu; Aliaga, Daniel; He, Cenlin; Chen, Fei; Magruder, Lori; Yang, Zong-Liang; Niyogi, Dev

Efficient urban layout generation is an interesting and important problem in many applications dealing with computer graphics and entertainment. We introduce a novel framework for intuitive and controllable small and large-scale urban layout editing. The key inspiration comes from the observation that cities develop in small incremental changes e.g., a building is replaced, or a new road is created. We introduce a set of atomic operations that consistently modify the city. For example, two buildings are merged, a block is split in two, etc. Our second inspiration comes from volumetric editings, such as clay manipulation, where the manipulated material is preserved. The atomic operations are used in interactive brushes that consistently modify the urban layout. The city is populated with agents. Like volume transfer, the brushes attract or repulse the agents, and blocks can be merged and populated with smaller buildings. We also introduce a large-scale brush that repairs a part of the city by learning style as distributions of orientations and intersections.

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