Guided Ecological Simulation For Artistic Editing of Plant Distributions In Natural Scenes

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach to author vegetation cover of large natural scenes. Unlike stochastic scatter-instancing tools for plant placement (such as multi-class blue noise generators), we use a simulation based on ecological processes to produce layouts of plant distributions. In contrast to previous work on ecosystem simulation, however, we propose a framework of global and local editing operators that can be used to interact directly with the live simulation. The result facilitates an artist-directed workflow with both spatially and temporally-varying control over the simulation's output. We compare our result against random-scatter solutions, also employing such approaches as a seed to our algorithm. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach within an iterative authoring workflow, comparing it to typical artistic methods.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

Guided Ecological Simulation For Artistic Editing of Plant Distributions In Natural Scenes. Gwyneth A. Bradbury, Kartic Subr, Charalampos Koniaris, Kenny Mitchell, Tim Weyrich. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), 4(4), 28–53, November 2015. Invited for oral presentation at i3D 2016.Gwyneth A. Bradbury, Kartic Subr, Charalampos Koniaris, Kenny Mitchell, and Tim Weyrich. Guided ecological simulation for artistic editing of plant distributions in natural scenes. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), 4(4):28–53, November 2015.Bradbury, G. A., Subr, K., Koniaris, C., Mitchell, K., and Weyrich, T. 2015. Guided ecological simulation for artistic editing of plant distributions in natural scenes. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 4, 4 (Nov.), 28–53.G. A. Bradbury, K. Subr, C. Koniaris, K. Mitchell, and T. Weyrich, “Guided ecological simulation for artistic editing of plant distributions in natural scenes,” Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 28–53, Nov. 2015. [Online]. Available: http://jcgt.org/published/0004/04/02/ PDF (46.9 MB) Low-res PDF (1.1 MB) Video (YouTube) i3D 2016 Presentation (7.9 MB) BibTeX

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the UCL EngD VEIV Centre for Doctoral Training through funding from both Disney Research and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with additional support by EPSRC grant EP/K023578/1.