Massive procedural content creation, for example, for virtual urban environments, is a difficult, yet important challenge. While\nshape grammars are a popular example of effectiveness in architectural modeling, they have clear limitations regarding readability,\nmanageability, and expressive power when addressing a variety of complex structural designs. Moreover, shape grammars aim\nat geometry specification and do not facilitate integration with other types of content, such as textures or light sources, which\ncould rather accompany the generation process. We present procedural content graphs, a graph-based solution for procedural\ngeneration that addresses all these issues in a visual, flexible, and more expressive manner. Besides integrating handling of diverse\ntypes of content, this approach introduces collective entity manipulation as lists, seamlessly providing features such as advanced\nfiltering, grouping, merging, ordering, and aggregation, essentially unavailable in shape grammars. Hereby, separated entities can\nbe easily merged or just analyzed together in order to perform a variety of context-based decisions and operations.The advantages\nof this approach are illustrated via examples of tasks that are either very cumbersome or simply impossible to express with previous\ngrammar approaches.
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