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.

Citation

Bradbury, G. A., Subr, K., Koniaris, C., Mitchell, K., & Weyrich, T. (2015). Guided ecological simulation for artistic editing of plant distributions in natural scenes. The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, 4(4), 28-53

• 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
• 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