Let's generate 3D worlds!

Procedural Generation:

Creating 3D worlds with Deep Learning

For our 6.S198 final project, we generated 3D worlds with neural networks in TensorFlow. They can be explored online and viewed on YouTube. If you’re interested in learning about how they were generated, read on!

What is Procedural Generation?

Procedural generation is two big words for one simple thing: the creation of data by computers. Procedural generation is usually used to create content for video games or animated movies, such as landscapes, 3D objects, character designs, animations, or non-player character dialogue. One famous example of this is the planets generated in “ No Man’s Sky.” In this game, players can explore 18 quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000,000) unique planets and moons, which were generated algorithmically by computers.

18 quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000,000) unique worlds!

The amazing thing about procedural generation is that infinite unique possibilities can be created with little work from humans. (Well, on second thought, maybe not little work from humans, but at least a “small amount” in comparison to the infinite number of possible generations.) We decided to use procedural generation - specifically deep learning procedural generation - to create 3D worlds of our own.

Data Collection

Why do we need data?

Input data needs to be collected before implementing deep neural networks . Neural networks are computer programs that greedily soak up data and learn through what we like to call “osmosis.” In reality, the learning process consists of continually updating small numbers called weights and biases that allow the network to generate data, such as images or likelihood values (e.g., the likelihood that an image is a cat).

To generate 3D worlds, we needed 3D model data and colour data. We collected terrain height maps for the 3D part of the project, and satellite images for the colour part of the project.

An example height map from Terrain.Party. This is a top view of a mountain range. The darker portions are lower altitude, and the lighter portions are higher altitude.
An example satellite image from USGS. This is a top view of the Dasht-e Lut Desert.

Terrain Maps and Web Scraping

To obtain the terrain map data, we scraped Terrain.Party. When we first found this website, we thought, “Perfect! We’ve got a dataset and we’ve barely even started!” It turns out that web scraping (getting large amounts of data from the web) is not that easy. We got help from one of our master-web-scraper friends, Bret Nestor, who wrote code using FireFox webdriver libraries to download and extract height maps. After many hours of scraping, we got over 10,000 height map images. Unfortunately though, not all of the images were usable, so we needed to clean the data, as described in the next section.

Cleaning Terrain Data

After obtaining the height maps, we noticed that some of them were duplicates, had little variation in depth (e.g., they were almost completely grey images), or were very dark. Thus, we wrote a script (delDarkUnvariedIdentical.py) to delete the unnecessary images and “clean” the data. Finally, to decrease our network’s training time, we re-sized the images to 256x256px (scaleToWidthxWidth.py).

Terrain images with good variation in height.

Before we could use the images as input for our neural network, we needed to flatten (or “pickle”) them. Our final “pickling” script (prepDataset.py) also rotates and flips the images to increase the total amount of training data. Rotation and flipping also reduces bias in the dataset to ensure the network doesn’t generate terrains that are purely in a certain direction.

Style Image Data Collection

Style images were obtained through USGS’s Earth as Art site. These images were very large (over 7000px in both height and width), so we ended up resizing them to about 512px, and finally to 256px. Although the images lose detail when scaled, we figured the images contained enough information for our style transfer network to learn.

Style images.

Height Map Generation

Generative Adversarial Network

To generate our own height maps, we used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GANs consist of a generator network, which generates fake images, and a discriminator network, which discriminates between real images and fake images. This generator-discriminator pair has been compared to a counterfeiter and the police. The counterfeiter (generator) creates increasingly realistic fake bills, and the police (discriminator) become increasingly good at discriminating between real and fake money. Essentially, as the police learn to find the fake bills, the counterfeiter needs to create better-looking bills, resulting in hyper-realistic bills in the long run. GANs work the same way. As the discriminator learns to spot fake images, the generator learns to create more realistic images.

The discriminator network discriminates between real and fake images. The generator generates fake images.

Amazon Web Services

It turns out that running a GAN (and almost any deep neural network, for that matter) takes an immense amount of computing power. Thus, we ran our GAN using TensorFlow on one of Amazon Web Services’ p2.xlarge GPUs.

Network Configuration, Iterations, and Hyperparameters

In practice, GANs are quite finicky and require a lot of tweaking before they generate realistic images. We uploaded thirteen different versions of our GAN to Github, so that you can see our network’s progression. We also listed the modifications we made in the README. Each GAN has different attributes and benefits, and produces very different height maps. Note that the final version of the GAN (v10) can be trained for much longer than the other GANs, as it resets the training data once the GAN has already been fed each training image.

Other tweaks include changing the discriminator and generator’s learning rates, number of layers, type of layers, convolutional filter sizes, and image batch size. Our final network had the following hyperparameters (learning rates, filter size, batch size, etc.) and layer configuration:

The generator takes input images (left), passes them through a network, and produces output images (right).

Colouring the Height Maps with Style Transfer

Fast Style Transfer

Fast style transfer refers to the concept of taking two images - a content image and a style image - and combining the features to produce an output image with the content of one image and the style of another. It does this by generating a loss to both a style and content image and creating an output image that tries to minimize this loss. It uses a gram matrix , which is a matrix that is multiplied with the transpose of itself, to find the style of the image and compare it with the original. Getting the distance between this matrix and the original style gram matrix gives us the style loss. A similar procedure can be done to find content loss. The model calculates the total loss by summing these two values. Our style transfer network uses VGG19, which is a 19-layer neural network, to identify both style and content of a picture, among many other features.

Example style transfer through Deepart.io. The style image is on the left, content image in center, and the final result is on the right. Note the similarities between the final image to both content and style images.

To illustrate, in the image above, we first note the image on the far left. This is our style image, which means it has the aesthetic qualities and colours that we’d want for our final output. The image in the middle is our content image, which refers to the details of the image. We want to create an output that has the information of the content image, in this case, a height map, with the artistic style of our style image. The resulting image is on the far right, which was produced by Deepart.io. We see that it has the distinguished patterns and colours of the style image while also preserving the blotches of white and black on our content image. Using a similar approach, we hoped to generate stylized height maps to give our 3D models colour.

Setting up the Fast Style Transfer Network

The code we started from was Logan Engstrom’s Fast Style Transfer code. We initially ran his code on Google Colab, feeding it a 512x512px input style image and 512x512px input content images. However, we noticed that we were running out of memory before the program could even begin training. After a few iterations of testing, we found that using 128px square images were compatible with both the code and Google Colab.

Training the Fast Style Transfer Network

We began with small batch sizes and small epochs when training the model to see the preliminary results, however, we noticed that even with a smaller dataset and a GPU, the training was taking close to the 12 hour maximum limit on Google Colab. We then decided to implement a way to save the model and reload it so that we could continue training. This allowed us to get better results. After increasing the amount of training data, the batch size, and the number of epochs that the model was trained for, the model began to have less loss in both style and content. We also changed the weights of the style and content images, which means that we altered how much each image should contribute to the model, and began to see more defined and promising images.

Left: low epochs, less training data. Right: high epochs, more training data.

Unfortunately, one of the big problems with the training data was that we didn’t have enough of it. We initially planned on having 56 thousand images for training the style and content losses through, but Google Drive wouldn’t allow us to import these 56 thousand images. Instead, we ended up importing only 28 thousand images and training on these. From previous assignments, we knew that using a larger sample of training data will tended to result in more accurate models, but unfortunately, we were not able to expand the training dataset. In the future, we think increasing the training samples and increasing training time would result in a more accurate representation of the style and content images. Even with the resources that were available, we were able to see the initial results that the model had learned.

Challenges

Checkerboard Artefacts

We started to notice a consistent grid-like structure appearing in our generated results for both the GAN and style transfer networks.

A generated image with a grid-like structure.

We found that these checkerboard patterns were caused by overlapping kernels and strides. More specifically, this occurs when the kernel size, which is the output size of the filters, is not divisible by the stride size, which is the amount that each filter is translated by. Below is a diagram that illustrates the overlap in kernels that create this grid.

An illustration of a deconvolutional layer generating the checkerboard pattern from the article, “Deconvolution and Checkerboard Artifacts” by Odena, Dumoulin, and Olah.

We solved this issue by using image_resize with bilinear sampling instead of using convolutional transpose. This means that we increase the size of the image by adding pixels that use the pixels on either side to determine its value rather than creating kernels and strides to resize the image. This gave us much better results and removed the artifacts from our images.

Example output results from both the GAN and Fast Style Transfer using bilinear sampling.

Visualizing the 3D Worlds

Making Explorable Terrain

To create an initial 3D model prototype from a height map, we used a Java program that converted PNG files to STL files. The following image shows a height map of Kelowna, BC, Canada, and the resulting 3D model.

A coloured 3D model of Kelowna. The deep blue and red part of the model is Okanagan Lake.

To add colour to the 3D model, we “stamped” a style-transferred image of Kelowna onto the 3D model. You can see the stylized image below. It was generated using the content of the height map above, the style of Leonid Afremov’s “Rain Princess” painting, and Fast Style Transfer.

The stylized image of Kelowna.

Being able to view the height map in 3D was exciting, but we wanted to go one step further and create explorable 3D worlds. To do so, we converted the PNGs to RAW files using GIMP, and imported these files into a program called Unity as terrains. The final results are shown below.

A 3D world we called, “Rolling” due to its rolling hills.
A 3D world we called, “Peaked” due to its many peaks.
A 3D world we called, “Small Hills” due to its bumpy terrain. This terrain is also shown at the beginning of this article with a different style image.
A 3D world we called, “Varied” due to its large variation in height.
A 3D world we called, “Ravines” due to its small crevices or ravines.
A 3D world we called, “Artefacts.” This model was generated with a height map and stylized image that had checkerboard artefacts.

These worlds can be explored online if you have an MIT Athena account, or viewed in this Youtube video.

3D Printed Worlds

Because seeing something virtually just isn’t enough

Finally, to allow ants and other small critters the pleasure of exploring our virtual worlds (because this is clearly a necessity), we 3D printed a few of the generated landscapes.

“Artefacts” in 3D printed plastic.
“Ravines” miniature.
“Rolling” in all of its 3D, hilly glory.

Final Notes

All in all, through this project we learned that creating an accurate deep learning model takes a long time, a lot of resources, and a lot of planning. Luckily, we had awesome mentors and online resources to help us, and we were ultimately successful in creating interesting, unique terrains. Many thanks go to our Google mentors, Lauren Stephens and James Wexler, our 6.S198 LA, Efraim Helman, the 6.S198 instructors, Natalie Lao and Hal Abelson, and the rest of the 6.S198 crew! Couldn’t have done it without you.

Article by Jessica Van Brummelen and Bryan Chen