The goal of this project is to address the issues of geometric detail and rendering speed by building a mulii-
resolution representation of trees, that allows a seamless change of scale, all the way from microscopic levels (e.g.
the user inspects the bark of a tree) to macroscopic levels (the user sees woods in the distance). As it is impossible
to hold all the geometry for the entire scene in memory, it is imperative to develop new methods for generating the
necessary data an the fly. Additionally, new methods for rendering will be devised to handle the lange amounts of
geometry that will be generated. The need for such new algorithms arises from the fact that convincing realism in
realtime rendering of trees has not been achieved with current methods.
In order to provide the necessary geometry it will be procedurally generated an the fly, at an adequate level of
detail for the current viewpoint. In this part of the project we will investigate methods for procedural generation of
plants with special emphasis an the multi-resolution nature of our desired output. The new methods will provide the
following advantages: geometry an demand, a true multi-resolution representation, and volume-based visibility
computation for occlusion culling. Since ihe enormous amounts of geometry required for realistic plants cannot be
completely rendered in every frame, new methods for real-time rendering of plants will be developed. Again the
multiresolution nature of the problem will be taken into account: as the viewer approaches small parts of a plant,
additional geometry will be rendered in a seamless way to create the Illusion of a coherent, detailed model of the
plant. Here level-of-detail techniques and Image-based rendering will be combined to a comprehensive new
method for rendering multi-resolution models of plants: in the near field, polygonal meshes, generated an the fly
will be used, in the far-field impostors will be used to amortize the rendering cost over multiple frames.
The project will result in a system for rendering trees in real-time, and in such a way that they can be viewed at a
distance or inspected up close without loss of geometric detail.