Guided ecological simulation for artistic editing of plant distributions in natural scenes

Bradbury, Gwyneth A; Subr, Kartic; Koniaris, Charalampos; Mitchell, Kenny; Weyrich, Tim

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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 22, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Nov 19, 2015
• Publication Date: 2015
• Deposit Date: Jun 23, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 28, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques
• Print ISSN: 2331-7418
• Electronic ISSN: 2331-7418
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 28-53
• Keywords: Artistic Editing, Natural Scenes,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/951633
• Contract Date: Jun 23, 2017