Gaia: Designed Procedural Content Generation
By: Jonathan Kyle Pittman
Supervisor: Wouter van Oortmerssen
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred March 23, 2007
Thesis / Project completed: March 21, 2007

As game worlds increase in scale and scope, the task of creating art and level assets by hand becomes ever more time consuming. The goal of this project is to provide intuitive tools for procedurally generating natural-looking terrain for game scenes in order to achieve faster results without significantly impacting the degree of control that an artist or designer may have over the output. This project consists of three separate components integrated into one cohesive tool. The first component is the basis functions for producing heightmap content, including implementations of Perlin noise and Worley noise which have been altered to allow customization to suit the needs of a designer, as well as functions for manipulating heightmaps in various ways, such as hydraulic erosion. The second component is a graphbased user interface which wraps this functionality and provides an intuitive visualization of the data flow. The final component is a demo scene viewer, used for rendering the output of the tool in real-time and in a game-like scenario, complete with a heightmapped terrain mesh, multiple texture layers, vegetation, water, and fog.

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