Fast Weather Simulation for Inverse Procedural Design of 3D Urban Models

Ignacio Garcia-Dorado^1,2    Daniel G. Aliaga¹    Saiprasanth Bhalachandran¹    Paul Schmid¹    Dev Niyogi¹

¹ Purdue University   ² Google Research

ACM Transactions on Graphics 2017

Abstract

We present the first realistic, physically-based, fully coupled, real-time weather design tool for use in urban procedural modeling. We merge designing of a 3D urban model with a controlled long-lasting spatiotemporal interactive simulation of weather. Starting from the fundamental dynamical equations similar to those used in state-of-the-art weather models, we present a novel simplified urban weather model for interactive graphics. Control of physically-based weather phenomena is accomplished via an inverse modeling methodology. In our results, we present several scenarios of forward design, inverse design with high-level and detailed-level weather control and optimization, as well as comparisons of our method against well-known weather simulation results and systems.

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Code

We provide the C++ code of our weather simulation. This code contains all the elements necassary to simulate weather: 1. loads an initial weather sounding, 2. randomly generates a terrain configuration, 3. runs our 3D weather simulation for any given number of simulation steps. For more details, please refer to the github and code documentation.

Images & Video

Citation

Ignacio Garcia-Dorado, Daniel G. Aliaga, Saiprasanth Bhalachandran, Paul Schmid, and Dev Niyogi. 2017. Fast Weather Simulation for Inverse Procedural Design of 3D Urban Models. ACM Trans. Graph. 36, 2, Article 21 (April 2017), 19 pages..

@article{GDA*2017,
 author = {Garcia-Dorado, Ignacio and Aliaga, Daniel G. and Bhalachandran, Saiprasanth and Schmid, Paul and Niyogi, Dev},
 title = {Fast Weather Simulation for Inverse Procedural Design of 3D Urban Models},
 journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
 issue_date = {April 2017},
 volume = {36},
 number = {2},
 month = apr,
 year = {2017},
 issn = {0730-0301},
 pages = {21:1--21:19},
 articleno = {21},
 numpages = {19},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2999534},
 doi = {10.1145/2999534},
 acmid = {2999534},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {Design, dynamical systems, inverse modeling, urban climate design, weather forecasting},
}