Point-based Rendering of Trees

Abstract

The goal of this paper is the interactive and realistic rendering of 3D trees covering a landscape. The landscape is composed by instantiating one or more block of vegetation on the terrain. A block of vegetation is composed by a single or a compact group of trees. For these blocks of vegetation, we propose a new representation based on triangle+point primitives organized into a regular spatial structure (grid). This structure is de ned onto easily adapt the level of details (LOD) of each subpart (cell) of the vegetation element. During the rendering process, we determine a global level of details for each block of vegetation. Then, we re ne it for each cell according to the following heuristic: leaves or branches on the rear of tree or inside the forest are statistically less visible than front ones and then can be rendered coarsely. As a result, our method greatly decrease the number of rendered primitives by preserving realism. This allows rendering of large landscape in interactive time, for a camera far away until inside.