Material
Abstract
We see plants nearly everywhere in our environment. They dominate outdoor scenes and most interior scenes as well. So why do we only have a few satisfactory plant models? We think it’s because, so far, creating plants is a job for experts who can handle the large structural and geometrical complexity of these models. In this article we present a modeling method that allows easy generation of many branching objects including flowers, bushes, trees, and even nonbotanical things. A set of components describing structural and geometrical elements of plants maps to a graph that forms the description of a specific plant and generates the geometry. Users get immediate feedback on what they’ve created—geometrical parameters, tropisms, and free-form deformations can control the overall shape of a plant. We’ll demonstrate that our method handles the complexity of most real plants.