Deriving Shape Grammars on the GPU

Due to growing demand for computer generated graphical content, procedural modeling has become an important topic in the gaming and movie industry. Creating vast amounts of content by hand requires excessive amounts of manual labor. Using a procedural rule set, entire worlds can be generated by a computer. However, the traditional CPUbased derivation of a large city can take multiple hours, making rapid design iterations impossible. In this paper, we investigate different strategies to execute procedural modeling on graphics processors using CUDA. We compare a persistent threads megakernel approach to simple kernel calls and different rule queuing strategies. Along these lines, we explore the trade-off between precompiling an entire rule set and interpreting a rule set online.

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