View-Dependent Impostors for Architectural Shape Grammars

Procedural generation has become a key component in satisfying a growing demand for ever-larger, highly detailed geometry in realistic, open-world games and simulations. In this paper, we present our work towards a new level-of-detail mechanism for procedural geometry shape grammars. Our approach automatically identifies and adds suitable surrogate rules to a shape grammar’s derivation tree. Opportunities for surrogates are detected in a dedicated pre-processing stage. Where suitable, textured impostors are then used for rendering based on the current viewpoint at runtime. Our proposed methods generate simplified geometry with superior visual quality to the state-of-the-art and roughly the same rendering performance.