Interactive authoring of simulation-ready plants

Yili Zhao, Jernej Barbič
2013 ACM Transactions on Graphics  
Figure 1 : Simulation of a peach tree with anatomically realistic geometry (Prunus Persica), with fracture. Peaches fall from the tree swaying in the space-time Perlin wind. 299,707 triangles, 237 branches, 3,556 twigs, 18,536 leaves, 330 fruits, 2,950 reduced DOFs, 7 hierarchy levels, 5 msec of simulation per graphical frame. Abstract Physically based simulation can produce quality motion of plants, but requires an authoring stage to convert plant "polygon soup" triangle meshes to a format
more » ... able for physically based simulation. We give a system that can author complex simulation-ready plants in a manner of minutes. Our system decomposes the plant geometry, establishes a hierarchy, builds and connects simulation meshes, and detects instances. It scales to anatomically realistic geometry of adult plants, is robust to non-manifold input geometry, gaps between branches or leaves, free-flying leaves not connected to any branch, spurious geometry, and plant self-collisions in the input configuration. We demonstrate the results using a FEM model reduction simulator that can compute large-deformation dynamics of complex plants at interactive rates, subject to user forces, gravity or randomized wind. We also provide plant fracture (with prespecified patterns), inverse kinematics to easily pose plants, as well as interactive design of plant material properties. We authored and simulated over 100 plants from diverse climates and geographic regions, including broadleaf (deciduous) trees and conifers, bushes and flowers. Our largest simulations involve anatomically realistic adult trees with hundreds of branches and over 100,000 leaves.
doi:10.1145/2461912.2461961 fatcat:badyvwbydfahxpgkdm6qh2lcr4