Plants - Books and Academic Papers
Recent Developments
-
NDVI-based
Vegetation Rendering (PDF
PPT)
- Stefan Roettger, In Proc. CGIM '07, IASTED Press, February
2007
- Describes using NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) as a
guide to distributing representative vegetation, derived from LandSat
Channels 3 (red) and 4 (near infrared). NDVI values are mapped to plant
height, from low values for grass to higher values indicating tree size.
- Example dataset has 10 million trees, reduced to 100k trees with
culling, rendered at 30 fps.
-
Rendering Grass Terrains in Real-Time with Dynamic Lighting
- sketch and paper by Boulanger, Pattanaik, and Bouatouch, Siggraph
2006
- uses per-pixel lighting, grass density maps, and three levels of
detail: geometry, vertical, and horizontal slices, with smooth
transitions between them
- claims worst-case 20 fps, common-case 80 fps or better on a NVidia
7800 GTX
- when highly anti-aliased, the results are beautiful
-

- Rendering
Forest Scenes in Real-Time
-
Philippe Decaudin and Fabrice Neyret, Eurographics Symposium on
Rendering, 2004
- uses texture-slicing to produce dense forests corresponding to
continuous non-repetitive fields made of thousands of trees with full
parallax
- the forest consists of a set of edge-compatible prisms containing
forest samples which are aperiodically mapped onto the ground, with
special treatment of silhouettes on ridges
- relies on LODs and on a GPU-friendly structure to achieve real-time
performance
- there are more details on Decaudin's site
Antisphere: Rendering Forest Scenes in Real-Time
- follow-on work:
GPU-Based
Lighting and Shadowing of Complex Natural Scenes
-
Blustery Trees
- Jeff Thelen, 2003
- describes a tree model and an approach for animation with a wind
generator
- demo includes Win32 source which requires the Direct3D from DX9
-
Interactive
Visualization of Complex Plant Ecosystems (pdf)
-
O.
Deussen, C. Colditz, M. Stamminger, G. Drettakis, IEEE Visualization
2002, October 2002
- describes an approach for drawing plant LODs using primitives
(points, lines)
- points are used mostly for leaves on trees, and flower petals
- lines are used for the blades of grasses
- octrees are used to efficiently choose which LOD to use, and
display lists are used for fast rendering
- they can do massive scenes (>120 million triangles full detail) at
several fps on a GeForce 3
-
Generating spatial distributions for multilevel models of plant communities
(pdf)

- Brendan Lane and Dr. P, 2002 proceedings of Graphics Interface
- describes two methods of distributing plants
- using an L-system-like approach (!) for simulating plant
competition
- using a probability field which is deformed by each plant
iteratively
-
Modelling
of ecosystems as a data source for real-time terrain rendering (pdf)

- (Abstract)
(Screenshots)
- Johan Hammes, Proceedings of DEM2001 (Digital Earth Moving, First
International Symposium)
- presents a way in which well-known techniques for modeling
ecosystems can be applied to generate the placement of plants on a
terrain automatically at run-time
- sufficiently fast to allow real-time computation, but also varied
enough to allow for natural looking placement of plants and ecosystems
while remaining deterministic
- active in plant research 1996-2004
- A Stable Modeling of Large Plant Ecosystems, 2002
- shows the importance of using environmental feedback (such as
depletion of the soil) in addition to normal competition between plants
- A Real-Time Visual Models of Plants Interacting with Virtual
Environment, and
- Virtual Climbing Plants Competing for Space, 2002
- give a brief summary of work in progress which actually simulates
both light and collision detection affecting plant growth
Research Projects
- Lenné3D was a years-long interdisciplinary project focusing on visualization of vegetation and GIS
data, with a significant component having to do with plants.
- Virtual Crops -
Architecture and Process Oriented Modelling
and Visualization of Crop Stands
- a German project (2000-2005?) of several universities to support
research into 3D modelling, simulation and visualization of crop plants
Books
- Trends in
Real-Time Landscape Visualization and Participation, Proceedings at
Anhalt University of Applied Sciences 2005
- includes several Plant papers
-
Computer generated plants (German/English)
- a website for the book Digital design of Nature and related
materials and software, including its German counterpart previously
published:
- Computergenerierte Pflanzen. Techniken und Design
digitaler Pflanzenwelten
("Computer-generated plants. Techniques and Design of Digital
Plant Worlds"), 2002 [at
amazon.com]
- by
Oliver Deussen, an overview of all CG plant and ecosystem efforts
over the years
- The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, 1990
[at bn.com] [online
as a PDF]
- Dr. Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer
- a very complete introduction to L-systems and their applicability to
plant modelling.
- Advances in Computational Life Sciences, Volume 1, 1997
[at
amazon.com]
- Plants to Ecosystem: Modelling of Biological Structures and
Processes
Other Articles
Papers of Dr. P
Other Important Papers
-
Papers and Publications Related to Xfrog
- Plant Models Faithful to Botanical Structure and Development
- P. de Reffye, C. Edelin, J. Francon, M. Jaeger and C. Puech,
Siggraph '88
- Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees
- Jason Weber & Joseph Penn, Siggraph '95 [images]
- Interactive Modelling of Branching Structures
- Realistic Modeling and Rendering of Plant Ecosystems [abstract]
[pdf]
-
Deussen O., Hanrahan P., Lintermann B., Mech R., Pharr M.,
Prusinkiewicz P., Siggraph '98
- Modelling Method And User Interface For Creating Plants [pdf]
- overview of the motivation and implementation of the XFrog package,
1998