Intelligent tools for creating synthetic scenes have been developed significantly in recent years. Existing techniques on interactive scene synthesis only incorporate a single object at every interaction, i.e., crafting a scene through a sequence of single-object insertions with user preferences. These techniques suggest objects by considering existent objects in the scene instead of fully picturing the eventual result, which is inherently problematic since the sets of objects to be inserted are seldom fixed during interactive processes. In this article, we introduce SceneDirector, a novel interactive scene synthesis tool to help users quickly picture various potential synthesis results by simultaneously editing groups of objects. Specifically, groups of objects are rearranged in real-time with respect to a position of an object specified by a mouse cursor or gesture, i.e., a movement of a single object would trigger the rearrangement of the existing object group, the insertions of potentially appropriate objects, and the removal of redundant objects. To achieve this, we first propose an idea of coherent group set which expresses various concepts of layout strategies. Subsequently, we present layout attributes, where users can adjust how objects are arranged by tuning the weights of the attributes. Thus, our method gives users intuitive control of both how to arrange groups of objects and where to place them. Through extensive experiments and two applications, we demonstrate the potentiality of our framework and how it enables concurrently effective and efficient interactions of editing groups of objects.

Commercial scenes such as markets and shops are everyday scenes for both virtual scenes and real-world interior designs. However, existing literature on interior scene synthesis mainly focuses on formulating and optimizing residential scenes such as bedrooms, living rooms, etc. Existing literature typically presents a set of relations among objects. It recognizes each furniture object as the smallest unit while optimizing a residential room. However, object relations become less critical in commercial scenes since shelves are often placed next to each other so pre-calculated relations of objects are less needed. Instead, interior designers resort to evaluating how groups of objects perform in commercial scenes, i.e., the smallest unit to be evaluated is a group of objects. This paper presents a system automatically synthesizes market-like commercial scenes in virtual environments. Following the rules of commercial layout design, we parameterize groups of objects as "patterns" contributing to a scene. Each pattern directly yields a human-centric routine locally, provides potential connectivity with other routines, and derives the arrangements of objects concerning itself according to the assigned parameters. In order to optimize a scene, the patterns are iteratively multiplexed to insert new routines or modify existing ones under a set of constraints derived from commercial layout designs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our framework to generate plausible and practical commercial scenes.