Tools for procedural generation of plants in virtual scenes

Abstract

Creating interactive graphics applications that present to the user realistic natural scenes is very difficult. Natural phenomena are very complex and detailed to model, and using traditional modeling techniques takes huge amounts of time and requires skilled artists to obtain good results. Procedural techniques allow to generate complex objects by defining a set of rules and selecting certain parameters. This allows to speed up the process of content creation and also allows to create objects on-the-fly, when needed. On-demand generation of scenes enables the authors to create potentially infinite worlds. This survey identifies the main features of the most used systems that implement procedural techniques to model plants and natural phenomena and discuss usability issues. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.