Procedural generation of man-made objects: a case study in Gothic window traceries

Abstract

To create a large virtual world, many objects are needed to make this world immersive and interesting. Often, the only way to reduce the costs of creating these objects is by using copies of the same object multiple times throughout the world. We propose an approach towards developing a system that may generate a large number of varying human-made objects automatically. We created such a system following our approach to automatically generate Gothic window traceries, and tested the quality and variety of our generated windows via two objective tests. We succeeded in creating a system that generates tracery designs that are indistinguishable from real Gothic designs, and the output of our generator is objectively percieved as more variable than copies of previously seen pictures.