Real-Time Rendering of Dynamic Vegetation

Information

• Publication Type: Master Thesis
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • Rendering and Modeling
• Date: May 2009
• Diploma Examination: 8. May 2009
• First Supervisor:
  • Michael Wimmer
  • Ralf Habel

Abstract

Plants are present in almost any type of interactive virtual environment like video games, movie pre-visualization or architectural or urban walkthroughs. The simulation complexity of plants increases with the evolution of graphics hardware, but rendering of plants still poses a lot of challenges. This is due to both the inherent geometric complexity of an individual tree having thousands of branches and tens of thousands of leaves, and the complex light interactions between the plant and sunlight. A portion of incoming light is transmitted through leaves, resulting in the bright translucency eect observed when looking at a leaf against the sun. Animating plants is another challenge, as thousands of interconnected branches and individual leaves have to react to turbulent wind moving through the treetop. All this should be performed at more than 60 frames per second for real-time interactive applications. This thesis presents novel algorithms to render leaves at very high detail with a physically based translucency model and to animate branches and leaves using a stochastic approach based on their physical properties. Both algorithms are executed entirely on the GPU in vertex and pixel shaders, so they can be easily integrated into any modern rendering pipeline. The eciency of the algorithms allows rendering and animating highly detailed plants with thousands of branches and tens of thousands of leaves at a frame rate of at 60 frames per second.

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BibTeX

@mastersthesis{kusternig-2009-rtr,
  title =      "Real-Time Rendering of Dynamic Vegetation",
  author =     "Alexander Kusternig",
  year =       "2009",
  abstract =   "Plants are present in almost any type of interactive virtual
               environment like video games, movie pre-visualization or
               architectural or urban walkthroughs. The simulation
               complexity of plants increases with the evolution of
               graphics hardware, but rendering of plants still poses a lot
               of challenges. This is due to both the inherent geometric
               complexity of an individual tree having thousands of
               branches and tens of thousands of leaves, and the complex
               light interactions between the plant and sunlight. A portion
               of incoming light is transmitted through leaves, resulting
               in the bright translucency eect observed when looking at a
               leaf against the sun. Animating plants is another challenge,
               as thousands of interconnected branches and individual
               leaves have to react to turbulent wind moving through the
               treetop. All this should be performed at more than 60 frames
               per second for real-time interactive applications. This
               thesis presents novel algorithms to render leaves at very
               high detail with a physically based translucency model and
               to animate branches and leaves using a stochastic approach
               based on their physical properties. Both algorithms are
               executed entirely on the GPU in vertex and pixel shaders, so
               they can be easily integrated into any modern rendering
               pipeline. The eciency of the algorithms allows rendering
               and animating highly detailed plants with thousands of
               branches and tens of thousands of leaves at a frame rate of
               at 60 frames per second.",
  month =      may,
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/E193-02, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology ",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2009/kusternig-2009-rtr/",
}