[Back]

A. Kusternig:
"Real-Time Rendering of Dynamic Vegetation";
Supervisor: M. Wimmer, R. Habel; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, TU Wien, 2009; final examination: 2009-05-08.

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 e ect 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 e ciency 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.