Expressive Illumination of Foliage Based on Implicit Surfaces

This paper presents an approach for vivid representations of foliage based on implicit surfaces. It approximates the complex lighting interaction within the foliage and enables a clear illustration of the general shape and the local density of the foliage, thus supporting the three-dimensional depth cue of the viewer. Due to its straightforward implementation as a preprocessing step that only adjusts the normal vectors of the geometry, this method has no additional memory requirements during the rendering process, and is especially applicable to real-time visualizations. Furthermore, it may be applied to photorealistic as well as nonphotorealistic visualizations, which both benefit from the modified normal vector information.

In the upcoming weeks, we will provide the source code of this project along with a precompiled version for win32.

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