ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2019

Synthetic Silviculture: Multi-scale Modeling
of Plant Ecosystems

Miłosz Makowski1       Torsten Hädrich2       Jan Scheffczyk2       Dominik L. Michels2       Sören Pirk3       Wojciech Pałubicki1*

1Adam Mickiewicz University
2KAUST
3Google Brain

*corresponding author





Abstract

Due to the enormous amount of detail and the interplay of various biological phenomena, modeling realistic ecosystems of trees and other plants is a challenging and open problem. Previous research on modeling plant ecologies has focused on representations to handle this complexity, mostly through geometric simplifications, such as points or billboards. In this paper we describe a multi-scale method to design large-scale ecosystems with individual plants that are realistically modeled and faithfully capture biological features, such as growth, plant interactions, different types of tropism, and the competition for resources. Our approach is based on leveraging inter- and intra-plant self-similarities for efficiently modeling plant geometry. We focus on the interactive design of plant ecosystems of up to 500K plants, while adhering to biological priors known in forestry and botany research. The introduced parameter space supports modeling properties of nine distinct plant ecologies while each plant is represented as a 3D surface mesh. The capabilities of our framework are illustrated through numerous models of forests, individual plants, and validations.


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Bibtex

@article{10.1145/3306346.3323039,
author     = {Makowski, Mi\l{}osz and H\"{a}drich, Torsten and Scheffczyk, Jan 
              and Michels, Dominik L. and Pirk, S\"{o}ren and Pa\l{}ubicki, Wojtek},
title      = {Synthetic Silviculture: Multi-Scale Modeling of Plant Ecosystems},
year       = {2019},
issue_date = {July 2019},
publisher  = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address    = {New York, NY, USA},
volume     = {38},
number     = {4},
issn       = {0730-0301},
url        = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3306346.3323039},
doi        = {10.1145/3306346.3323039},
journal    = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
month      = jul,
articleno  = {131},
numpages   = {14},
keywords   = {self-organization, botanical tree models, natural phenomena, interactive modeling, 
              self-similarity, ecosystem design, plant ecosystems, multi-scale, visual models of trees}
}