Procedural Forest Generation
By: Marek Vojtko
Supervisor: Jeff Wofford
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred December 12, 2008
Thesis / Project completed: December 12, 2008

Forest generation has always been one of the more mundane and tiresome tasks of a level designer. A good-looking and natural-feeling forest requires many trees, densely packed together, and positioned in a non-repeating, random manner. The position or orientation of one tree becomes unimportant as long as the whole looks good and feels natural. Procedural content generation tries to address this type of problem – by generating a large amount of elements in a random fashion the level designer no longer needs to spend time creating the content, but can focus on modifying it instead.

The thesis presents Forester, the tool for controlled procedural generation of forests. The application creates a forest within seconds based on organic noise textures that control several of the forest’s properties (such as density, size of trees, etc.). The user can then modify the new forest through direct interaction with the noise textures and appraise the results in a three-dimensional real-time preview window.

Forester’s goal is to produce forests that are directly usable in game and unique or memorable. These attributes should be common to all forests created by the application and provided automatically. In addition, the thesis examines the user interface and control paradigms controlling procedurally generated content and evaluates their feasibility. Lastly, the thesis measures the performance of Forester as compared with typical level editors by comparing the creation times and resulting forests.

Download entire thesis (.pdf)