Realistic Placement of Plants for Virtual Environments

Creating natural forest landscapes for virtual environments (VEs) requires basic knowledge of botany and ecology, without which the terrain might appear synthetic. Although tools such as scene editors have made designers´ jobs easier, manually creating a natural-looking landscape is time-consuming. And, depending on the artist´s knowledge, the results often don´t follow the principles of ecology and spatially viable plant positioning. A proposed approach adopts lessons from ecological modeling to grow vegetation as ground cover for virtual outdoor scenes. It simulates ecologically and spatially realistic placement of plants, from which users can employ the XML-based position data to populate other 2D and 3D VEs. Simulation results show this approach´s potential for more complex applications, such as real-time plant growth and state changes in VEs.