Parameterized plant builder for forest growth simulation and forest real-time rendering

Dynamic rendering large scale forest is still difficult, since it needs to create, maintain, grow and destruct tens of thousands of plant objects at runtime. This paper deals with this difficulty and presents a scene graph based scheme that allows us to model plants according to their growth stages, organ structures, and level of detail (LOD) requirements. To efficiently manipulate plant objects at runtime, plant growth data are stored in extensible markup language (XML) file, and a parameterized plant builder is developed to load proper plant model into memory and transform it to target appearance with given parameters. In order to decrease the memory consumption, all plant objects in memory are created and managed by plant builder in a centralized way so that plant objects can share textures, drawing states and other resources. By discretizing parameters that is used to create or grow plant objects, plant builder decreases the number of plant objects that really need to create in memory, and accelerates the plant creation and growth speed.