Recent Advances in Procedural Generation of Buildings: From Diversity to Integration

In this article, we survey the state-of-the-art in procedural generation of buildings (PGB). We analyzed the design choices, capabilities, and limitations of 71 PGB approaches. We structured our analysis based on a taxonomy of procedural content generation (PCG) that we adapted to PGB by adding relevant details. Overall, we identified 13 taxonomical aspects, which we organized in three groups: 1) generative capabilities, 2) accessibility aspects, and 3) technological aspects of the implementation. It is shown that the generation of different parts of buildings is easiest to accomplish with different PGB techniques. While some approaches built on other ones or even integrate two or more of them to arrive at solutions with a greater effective generative scope, all of them still exhibit rather basic limitations. For instance, the choice of room geometries might be limited to rectangular rooms, they might require numerous manual creation steps, or they might yield potentially invalid output. In addition, only few approaches implement fitting interiors and exteriors, which can be used as complete, traversable buildings in virtual environments. Hence, the combination and therefore integration of different approaches for different parts of buildings is a major concern of procedural building generators, rendering their compatibility a characteristic of central importance.