The simulation of the growing process of virtual plant leaves

How to simulate the morphological and physiological structural changes of plant organs has always been a challenging task in computer graphics. In this paper we visualize the growing process of tree leaves by modeling textural color changes and geometric deformations appeared at different growth stages. We first build the three-dimensional geometric models of leaves from the corresponding 2D images. At least one representative leaf image is used to denote one growth stage. We then adopt the constrained mass-spring model to simulate the 3D deformation of leaves at different stages. Furthermore, different leaf textures are mapped to corresponding 3D models to realize the varying appearances. We have done our experiments to maple leaves and realize its full growth process. The simulation results are similar to what we observed at real life, which shows that this method is effective to visualize the growth of 3D leaves.