skip to main content
10.1145/1037210.1037229acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessccgConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

A ray density estimation approach to take into account environment illumination in plant growth simulation

Published: 22 April 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Light interaction is one of the most important factors in developing realistic plant models. Plants react to received illumination by bending branches, adapting their growth rate, orienting leaves and flowers, producing larger or smaller leaves, etc.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to simulate plant growth as a response to environment illumination. The basic idea of our algorithm is to simulate light transport in the environment in which plants grow by tracing light particles originating from light sources. Both intensity and mean direction of incident illumination are determined easily. This is based on a ray density estimation of the environment illumination by means of a predominant illumination direction.
An adaptive spatial data structure is used to store the rays along which light particles travel in space. This data structure allows efficient calculation of ray density at locations where the algorithm needs to query incident illumination.
Our approach takes into account both direct and indirect illumination and is an algorithm that is both flexible and accurate. It is easy to implement and more general illumination models can be incorporated in a straightforward manner. Furthermore, using a non-uniform, adaptive data structure for storing the rays, calculation time and storage requirements are kept within reasonable limits.

References

[1]
Aono, M., and Kunii, T. 1984. Botanical image tree generation. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 4, 5, 10--34.
[2]
Benes, B., and Millan, E. U. 2002. Virtual climbing plants competing for space. In Computer Animation Proceedings 2002, ACM Press, 33--42.
[3]
Bloomenthal, J. 1985. Modeling the mighty maple. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '85 Proceedings) 19, 3 (July), 305--311.
[4]
De Reffye, P., Edelin, C., Francon, J., Jaeger, M., and Puech, C. 1988. Plant models faithful to botanical structure and development. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '88 proceedings) 22, 4 (Aug.), 151--158.
[5]
Deussen, O., and Lintermann, B., 1998. software: xfrog 2.0, www.greenworks.de.
[6]
Deussen, O., Hanrahan, P., Lintermann, B., Mech, R., Pharr, M., and Prusinkiewicz, P. 1998. Realistic modeling and rendering of plant ecosystems. In SIGGRAPH '98 Conference Proceedings, ACM Press, ACM SIGGRAPH, 275--286.
[7]
Greene, N. 1989. Voxel space automata: modeling with stochastic growth processes in voxel space. SIGGRAPH '89 23, 3 (July), 175--184.
[8]
Jensen, H. W. 2001. Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping (1st edition). AK Peters.
[9]
Kendrik, R., and Kronenberg, G. 1986. Photomorphogenesis in Plants. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[10]
Lane, B., and Prusinkiewicz, P. 2002. Generating spatial distributions for multilevel models of plant communities. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2002, 69--80.
[11]
Lintermann, B., and Deussen, O. 1999. Interactive modeling of plants. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 19, 1 (Jan./Feb.), 56--65.
[12]
Měch, R., and Prusinkiewicz, P. 1996. Visual models of plants interacting with their environment. In SIGGRAPH '96 Conference Proceedings, ACM Press, ACM SIGGRAPH, 397--410.
[13]
Oppenheimer, P. August 1986. Real time design and animation of fractal plants and trees. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '86 proceedings) 20, 4.
[14]
Prusinkiewicz, P., and Hammel, M. 1994. Language restricted iterated functions, koch constructions and 1-systems. SIGGRAPH '94 Course Notes.
[15]
Prusinkiewicz, P., and Kari, L. 1996. Subapical bracketed 1-systems. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1073, Springer Verlag, 550--564.
[16]
Prusinkiewicz, P., and Lindenmayer, A. 1990. The Algoritmic Beauty of Plants. Springer Verlag.
[17]
Prusinkiewicz, P., James, M., and Měch, R. 1994. Synthetic topiary. Computer Graphics 28, Annual Conference Series (July), 351--358.
[18]
Prusinkiewicz, P., Hammel, M., Hanan, J., and Měch, R. 1996. L-systems: From the theory to visual models of plants. In Proc. 2nd CSIRO Symp. Computational Challenges in Life Sciences, CSIRO Publishing, P.O. Box 1139, Collingwood 3066, Australia, M. T. Michalewicz, Ed.
[19]
Prusinkiewicz, P., Mundermann, L., Lane, B., and Karwowski, R. 2001. The use of positional information in the modelling of plants. In SIGGRAPH '01 Conference Proceedings, ACM Press, ACM SIGGRAPH.
[20]
Reeves, W., and Blau, R. 1985. Approximate and probabilistic algorithms for shading and rendering structured particle systems. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '85 proceedings) 19, 3 (July), 313--322.
[21]
Reeves, W. 1983. Particle systems - a technique for modelling a class of fuzzy objects. In ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 2, Nr 2.
[22]
Silverman, B. W. 1986. Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis. Chapman and Hall.
[23]
Soler, C., Sillion, F., Blaise, F., and Reffye, P. D. 2003. An efficient instantiation algorithm for simulating radiant energy transfer in plant models. ACM Transactions on Graphics 2003 22, 2 (Apr.), 204--233.
[24]
Van Haevre, W., and Bekaert, P. 2003. A simple but effective algorithm to model the competition of virtual plants for light and space. In Journal of WSCG, 464--471.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)New Coupled Canopy–Light Model (CCLM) to Improve Visual Polymorphism Simulation of Fir MorphologyForests10.3390/f1403059514:3(595)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2023
  • (2013)Modeling plant plasticity from a biophysical modelProceedings of the 12th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and Its Applications in Industry10.1145/2534329.2534357(115-122)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2013
  • (2012)Quantification of light absorption and photosynthesis of tobacco canopy using 3-D modeling2012 IEEE 4th International Symposium on Plant Growth Modeling, Simulation, Visualization and Applications10.1109/PMA.2012.6524855(340-346)Online publication date: Oct-2012
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. A ray density estimation approach to take into account environment illumination in plant growth simulation

    Recommendations

    Reviews

    Dik Kettenis

    A computer program that models plant growth caused by illumination of the plant is described in this paper. This is an interesting application, situated on the cross-section of the fields of biology and computer graphics. The data structure for storing the environment and the geometry of plants is based on octrees. The algorithm to estimate the illumination is inspired by photon mapping, and includes indirect illumination. The growth of the plants is based on so-called L-systems. The authors present some examples to show that their algorithm can be adjusted easily to more complex behavior, such as branches that may bend or remain straight depending on the amount of illumination reaching them. The paper contains some nice pictures generated by the software described. In general, the paper is clear and well written. However, the description of the illumination part of the program is a bit confusing, because many alternative approaches are mentioned. Sometimes it is not clear what method is included in the authors' algorithms. I expect that people not knowledgeable about L-systems will have trouble understanding the plant growth part of the algorithm. Furthermore, a more explicit definition of some terms and variables would have improved the clarity of this part. Online Computing Reviews Service

    Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

    Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SCCG '04: Proceedings of the 20th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics
    April 2004
    233 pages
    ISBN:1581139675
    DOI:10.1145/1037210
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 22 April 2004

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. L-systems
    2. light interaction
    3. natural phenomena
    4. phototropism
    5. plant modeling
    6. ray density

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    SCCG04
    Sponsor:
    SCCG04: Spring Conference in Computer Graphics 2004
    April 22 - 24, 2004
    Budmerice, Slovakia

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 67 of 115 submissions, 58%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 30 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)New Coupled Canopy–Light Model (CCLM) to Improve Visual Polymorphism Simulation of Fir MorphologyForests10.3390/f1403059514:3(595)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2023
    • (2013)Modeling plant plasticity from a biophysical modelProceedings of the 12th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and Its Applications in Industry10.1145/2534329.2534357(115-122)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2013
    • (2012)Quantification of light absorption and photosynthesis of tobacco canopy using 3-D modeling2012 IEEE 4th International Symposium on Plant Growth Modeling, Simulation, Visualization and Applications10.1109/PMA.2012.6524855(340-346)Online publication date: Oct-2012
    • (2009)Interactive modeling of virtual ecosystemsProceedings of the Fifth Eurographics conference on Natural Phenomena10.5555/2381692.2381694(9-16)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2009
    • (2006)Physically-based driven tree animationsProceedings of the Second Eurographics conference on Natural Phenomena10.5555/2381370.2381382(75-82)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2006

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media