INMACULADA REMOLAR, MIGUEL CHOVER, JOSÉ RIBELLES,
ÓSCAR BELMONTE
UNIVERSITAT JAUME I
Department of LENGUAJES Y SISTEMAS INFORMATICOS
12004 CASTELLÓN
SPAIN
e-mail: {remolar,chover,ribelles,belfern}@uji.es |
http://graficos.uji.es/trees/ |
Keywords: Tree Rendering, View Dependent Visualization, Multiresolution Modeling, Level of Detail, Real-Time Rendering.
Abstract
Real-time rendering of vegetation is one of the most important
challenges in outdoor scenes. This is due to the vast amount of polygons
that are used to model vegetable species. Multiresolution modeling has been
successfully presented as a solution to the problem of efficient manipulation
of highly detailed polygonal surfaces. In order to construct a multiresolution
model, a simplification method must be used. The previously introduced Foliage
Simplification Algorithm, FSA, obtains different approximations of a tree
model. This automatic simplification method diminishes the number of polygons
that form the crown while maintaining its leafy appearance. In this paper
a multiresolution model for trees based on this simplification algorithm is
presented. Its distinctive property is that the unit of information managed
by this scheme is the leaf, four vertices determining two triangles. This
characteristic allows us an efficient manipulation of the results obtained
by FSA. Our multiresolution representation provides a wide, virtually continuous,
range of different approximations that represent the original tree. The main
property of this scheme is that trees can be represented with variable resolution:
some regions in more detail while the rest is represented in less detail.
Here we present the data structures and the traversing algorithms, which favor
the extraction of an appropriate level of detail for rendering.