Many computer games engines provide a 3D (three-dimensional) graphical simulation of the earth through which the player can navigate. Generation of the simulated environment involves a lot of manual work, including manual positioning of terrain elements such as mountains, lakes and forests. For highly detailed views of the simulated environment, 3D objects may be placed manually within the environment; these objects may be individual trees or buildings or shapes may be defined along with sets of objects (e.g. trees) which are to populate the shape and a simulation engine may then automatically populate the shape with objects from the defined sets. This process is very complex and time consuming and must be repeated for each new version of the game/simulation engine.
In order to reduce the amount of manual work required, data may be obtained from aerial imagery or existing 3D models (e.g. Microsoft® Virtual Earth™). However, the information used within a simulation engine is usually highly optimized (e.g. restricted polygon counts or optimized texture maps) and therefore the existing data is generally not usable or, as is the case for aerial imagery, still requires a considerable amount of hand editing and cannot be processed automatically.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known methods of generated simulated graphical environments.