Linear diffusion for generating plant distribution in natural environment simulation

Seamless simulation and rendering of realistic natural environments has the goals of modeling the terrain and placing large groups of plants in a manner that would generate a scene similar to what a viewer would see in real life. The placement of plants is derived automatically from real land cover classification (LCC) data which describes each area on the map as a single vegetation type. This work presents a method for solving the problem of plant distribution in transition areas between different vegetation classes by using the concept of linear diffusion in an arbitrary direction. In practice this direction can be determined by different climatic factors. Our proposed implementation can accurately process a high number of neighboring areas in real-time by using parallel processing on the graphics processing unit.