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Abstract: Games, movies, and virtual worlds often require generating complex buildings, vegetation, and terrain. Come learn about new techniques for automatically generating complex structures from a small training set. Recent advancements in the field have now overcome many long-standing problems and limitations of previous methods. Earlier techniques like Wave Function Collapse and Model Synthesis are limited to structures built out of tiles. A new approach uses a powerful mathematical tool called a graph grammar. The new approach can generate a huge variety of complex shapes using simple grammars. While the grammars themselves are automatically generated from a small example.

Biography:  Paul Merrell studied Electrical Engineering at BYU and then received a PhD in Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. His PhD work inspired the popular Wave Function Collapse algorithm. He then worked as a postdoc at Stanford University. Paul Merrell’s research has focused on creating tools for games, animations, and virtual worlds. He worked at Google on Google Maps for nine years. He is currently a software engineer at a startup called Luminary Cloud. He also runs a YouTube channel about astronomy called “It’s Just Astronomical”.