Realistic real-time rendering for large-scale forest scenes

Fast rendering of a large-scale forest landscape scene is important in many applications, as video games, Internet graphics applications, landscape or cityscape scene design and visualization, and virtual forestry. A challenge in virtual reality is realistic rendering of large scale scenes consisting of complex plant models. A series of level of detail tree models are usually constructed to compress the overall forest complexity in view-dependent forest navigation. In this paper a new leaf modeling method is presented to have leaf models match leaf textures, so that the visual effect and model complexity can be balanced well. In addition, vertex buffer objects and tree clipping operation allow rendering a large forest containing thousands of trees in real-time. The experiments show that these techniques can be easily used in applications such as video games and interactive navigation of landscapes. Walk-through and flyover a forest are both feasible using our techniques.