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arXiv · 2208.01471

Procedural Generation and Rendering of Realistic, Navigable Forest Environments: An Open-Source Tool

Abstract

Simulation of forest environments has applications from entertainment and art creation to commercial and scientific modelling. Due to the unique features and lighting in forests, a forest-specific simulator is desirable, however many current forest simulators are proprietary or highly tailored to a particular application. Here we review several areas of procedural generation and rendering specific to forest generation, and utilise this to create a generalised, open-source tool for generating and rendering interactive, realistic forest scenes. The system uses specialised L-systems to generate trees which are distributed using an ecosystem simulation algorithm. The resulting scene is rendered using a deferred rendering pipeline, a Blinn-Phong lighting model with real-time leaf transparency and post-processing lighting effects. The result is a system that achieves a balance between high natural realism and visual appeal, suitable for tasks including training computer vision algorithms for autonomous robots and visual media generation.

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BibTeXRIS

Callum Newlands, Klaus-Peter Zauner. 2022-08-02. Procedural Generation and Rendering of Realistic, Navigable Forest Environments: An Open-Source Tool. https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01471

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