Example-based large-scale marine scene authoring using Wang Cubes

Abstract

Virtual marine scene authoring plays an important role in generating large-scale 3D scenes and it has a wide range of applications in computer animation and simulation. Existing marine scene authoring methods either produce periodic patterns or generate unnatural group distributions when tiling marine entities such as schools of fish and groups of reefs. To this end, we propose a new large-scale marine scene authoring method based on real examples in order to create more natural and realistic results. Our method first extracts the distribution of multiple marine entities from real images to create Octahedral Blocks, and then we use a modified Wang Cubes algorithm to quickly tile the 3D marine scene. As a result, our method is able to generate aperiodic tiling results with diverse distributions of density and orientation of entities. We validate the effectiveness of our method through intensive comparative experiments. User study results show that our method can generate satisfactory results which are in accord with human preferences.