GardenDesigner: Encoding Aesthetic Principles into Jiangnan Garden Construction via a Chain of Agents
Authors: Mengtian Li, Fan Yang, Ruixue Xiong, Yiyan Fan, Zhifeng Xie, Zeyu Wang
Organizations: Shanghai University · Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Motion Picture Special Effects · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Jiangnan gardens, a prominent style of Chinese classical gardens, hold great potential as digital assets for film and game production and digital tourism. However, manual modeling of Jiangnan gardens heavily relies on expert experience for layout design and asset creation, making the process time-consuming. To address this gap, we propose GardenDesigner, a novel framework that encodes aesthetic principles for Jiangnan garden construction and integrates a chain of agents based on procedural modeling. The water-centric terrain and explorative pathway rules are applied by terrain distribution and road generation agents. Selection and spatial layout of garden assets follow the aesthetic and cultural constraints. Consequently, we propose asset selection and layout optimization agents to select and arrange objects for each area in the garden. Additionally, we introduce GardenVerse for Jiangnan garden construction, including expert-annotated garden knowledge to enhance the asset arrangement process. To enable interaction and editing, we develop an interactive interface and tools in Unity, in which non-expert users can construct Jiangnan gardens via text input within one minute. Experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that GardenDesigner can generate diverse and aesthetically pleasing Jiangnan gardens. Project page is available at https://monad-cube.github.io/GardenDesigner.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of the GardenDesigner pipeline. GardenDesigner transforms the user input into a Jiangnan garden through Hierarchical Garden Composition and Knowledge-Embedded Asset Arrangement. First, Hierarchical Garden Composition transfers the user input into parameters for terrain and road generation with aesthetic principles. Subsequently, Knowledge-Embedded Asset Arrangement chooses the objects based on the garden knowledge and area information, and then optimization loss is used to get the feasible solution for layout.
Figure 3: The five constraints categories: (a) Global, edge, and middle; (b) Position, around, and backed up; (c) Distance, near and far; (d) Alignment, aligned; And (e) Rotation, face to.
Figure 4: GardenVerse construction from Internet repositories and manual modeling. We invite experts to modify the architectures and construct object combinations. Finally, garden experts annotate the basic information and garden knowledge for assets.
Figure 5: Qualitative analysis. In (a), we input the same prompt to GardenDesigner and the baseline [ 25 ] to evaluate the generated garden quality with three different views for each garden. In (b), we compare four methods: (1) Baseline [ 25 ] , (2) Baseline with GardenVerse assets, (3) GardenDesigner, and (4) GardenDesigner without Knowledge-Embedded Asset Arrangement to conduct the ablation experiment.
Method
Path-S ↑
Class-Div
FD
CLIP-S ↑
Liu et al. [25]
0
21.8 ± 1.6
1.42 ± 0.1
27.4 ± 0.1
Ours
8.1 ± 2.5
68.3 ± 5.6
1.36 ± 0.1
27.6 ± 0.1
Table 1: Quantitative comparison. We evaluate our method with the baseline method from four metrics: (1) the pathway rationality (Path-S), (2) the diversity of objects (Class-Div), (3) the structural complexity (FD), and (4) text and scene similarity (CLIP-S).
Method
CLIP-A ↑
VLM-S ↑
QA-Quality ↑
Liu et al. [25]
52.9 ± 1.0
24.9 ± 1.2
43.8 ± 2.5
Ours
54.2 ± 2.0
32.5 ± 2.3
53.8 ± 3.1
Table 2: VLMs-based comparison. We render garden images and utilize VLMs to evaluate them from rationality, aesthetic quality, and atmosphere via CLIP-A, VLM-S, and QA-Quality.
Method
FD
CLIP-S ↑
VLM-S ↑
Ours w/o Arrange.
1.27 ± 0.1
27.4 ± 0.1
31.6 ± 1.1
Ours
1.36 ± 0.1
27.6 ± 0.1
32.5 ± 2.3
Table 3: Ablation study for object layout optimization. We evaluate the Knowledge-Embedded Asset Arrangement module by removing it, based on three metric perspetives.
Normal
Hydric
Floral
Arch-dense
Mazy
Baseline
7.58
7.58
4.54
3.03
7.58
Baseline*
12.12
9.09
18.18
10.61
22.72
Ours*
18.18
40.91
10.61
12.12
19.70
Ours
62.12
42.42
66.67
74.24
50.00
Table 4: Selection ratio (↑) of different methods for five garden types: (1) Baseline [ 25 ] , (2) Baseline* (Baseline with GardenVerse), (3) Ours* (GardenDesigner without Knowledge-Embedded Asset Arrangement, (4) Ours (GardenDesigner).
Figure 6: Comparing the selection ratio of four methods in the experiment from four perspectives: (1) Overall Quality, (2) Text Relevance, (3) Spatial Layout, (4) Cultural Atmosphere.
Figure 7: Two applications: (a) Generating a 2D garden construction layout, which can be used to build the garden; (b) Navigating to a spot of interest following the user’s instructions.
Figure 8: GardenVerse data examples. The GardenVerse consists of four types of objects: (a) the Architecture, (b) the Structure, (c) the Plant, and (d) the Rock. The plant and rock include both single and combined objects.
Figure 9: GardenVerse statistics: (a) the object categories proportional distribution; (b) the combined and single objects ratio.
Figure 10: GardenVerse dataset. GardenVerse includes a collection of diverse 3D objects specially designed for Jiangnan gardens, and we show object examples from the dataset. GardenVerse encompasses four distinct object categories: architecture, plant, and rock, containing single objects and combination asset forms.
Method
CLIP-S ↑
CLIP-A ↑
VLM-S ↑
QA-Quality ↑
Infinigen
18.1
51.6
6.3
24.9
SceneX
23.1
53.1
5.5
37.6
NuiScene
25.6
53.7
10.3
46.3
PCG
27.4
53.9
28.9
51.2
Ours
27.6
54.2
32.5
53.8
Table 5: Quantitative comparison with different methods.
Method
FD
VLM-S ↑
QA-Quality ↑
w/o Lglo
1.39
31.8
48.9
w/o Lpos
1.38
32.2
50.9
w/o Ldis
1.38
31.9
48.6
w/o Lali
1.40
32.3
49.6
w/o Lrot
1.36
32.3
50.3
Ours
1.36
32.5
53.8
Table 6: Ablation study results on optimization losses.
Figure 11: Qualitative results. (a) We conduct the ablation study to compare the different methods for garden construction with same user input, and the view from left to right is front view, right view and top view. (b) We input the same user instruction to evaluate the generation diversity of GardenDesigner. (c) We also input the same user instruction and keep the same terrain to generate different gardens.
Figure 12: Questionnaire Survey. We conducted human evaluation with experts and no-experts. (a) In non-expert questionnaire, we provide four questions from overall quality, text relevance, spatial layout, and cultural atmosphere for volunteers to answer. And we provide five types of generated Jiangan gardens from four different methods. (b) We refine the question about sptatial layout and cultural atmosphere.
Figure 13: Prompts for the terrain generation agent.
Figure 14: Prompts for the road generation agent.
Figure 15: Prompts for the asset selection agent.
Figure 16: First part of prompts for the layout optimization agent.
Figure 17: Second part of prompts for the layout optimization agent.
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