Abstract Procedural modeling is used across many industries for rapid 3D content creation. However, professional procedural tools often lack artistic control, requiring manual edits on baked results, diminishing the advantages of a procedural modeling pipeline. Previous approaches to enable local artistic control require special annotations of the procedural system and manual exploration of potential edit locations. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to discover meaningful and non‐redundant good edit locations (GELs). We introduce a bottom‐up algorithm for finding GELs directly from the attributes in procedural models, without special annotations. To make attribute edits at GELs persistent, we analyze their local spatial context and construct a meta‐locator to uniquely specify their structure. Meta‐locators are calculated independently per attribute, making them robust against changes in the procedural system. Functions on meta‐locators enable intuitive and robust multi‐selections. Finally, we introduce an algorithm to transfer meta‐locators to a different procedural model. We show that our approach greatly simplifies the exploration of the local edit space, and we demonstrate its usefulness in a user study and multiple real‐world examples.

PushPull tools are implemented in most commercial 3D modeling suites. Their purpose is to intuitively transform a face, edge, or vertex, and then to adapt the polygonal mesh locally. However, previous approaches have limitations: Some allow adjustments only when adjacent faces are orthogonal; others support slanted surfaces but never create new details. Moreover, self-intersections and edge-collapses during editing are either ignored or work only partially for solid geometry. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the PushPull++ tool for rapid polygonal modeling. In our solution, we contribute novel methods for adaptive face insertion, adjacent face updates, edge collapse handling, and an intuitive user interface that automatically proposes useful drag directions. We show that PushPull++ reduces the complexity of common modeling tasks by up to an order of magnitude when compared with existing tools.

Abstract In this paper, we present new solutions for the interactive modeling of city layouts that combine the power of procedural modeling with the flexibility of manual modeling. Procedural modeling enables us to quickly generate large city layouts, while manual modeling allows us to hand‐craft every aspect of a city. We introduce transformation and merging operators for both topology preserving and topology changing transformations based on graph cuts. In combination with a layering system, this allows intuitive manipulation of urban layouts using operations such as drag and drop, translation, rotation etc. In contrast to previous work, these operations always generate valid, i.e., intersection‐free layouts. Furthermore, we introduce anchored assignments to make sure that modifications are persistent even if the whole urban layout is regenerated.

We introduce a real-time interactive visual editing paradigm for shape grammars, allowing the creation of rulebases from scratch without text file editing. In previous work, shape-grammar based procedural techniques were successfully applied to the creation of architectural models. However, those methods are text based, and may therefore be difficult to use for artists with little computer science background. Therefore the goal was to enable a visual work-flow combining the power of shape grammars with traditional modeling techniques. We extend previous shape grammar approaches by providing direct and persistent local control over the generated instances, avoiding the combinatorial explosion of grammar rules for modifications that should not affect all instances. The resulting visual editor is flexible: All elements of a complex state-of-the-art grammar can be created and modified visually.