Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Physically Based Simulation of Weathering Plant Leaves
Authors	CHI Xiao-Yu1) SHENG Bin3) CHEN Yan-Yun2) WU En-Hua1),3)
Address	1)(State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190) 2)(Autodesk, Shanghai 200127) 3(Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macao)
Year	2009
Issue	No.2(221—230)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract This paper presents a method for the efficient simulation of a large number of plant leaves, realistically showing their weathering process in autumn time, with various deformed shapes. In modeling various shapes of leaves for weathering, the authors introduce a botanically and physically based method is introduced for simulating variations of leaf shape by using a double layered model (DLM). This model takes advantage of the key observation that the withered shapes of leaves are caused by different shrinkages between the mesophyll cells and vein cells during the aging process of leaves. By setting up the mass-spring system in two interconnecting layers, different kinetic manners of mesophyll and veins can be simulated respectively. Meanwhile the double layers affect each other and determine together the deformed shape of leaves. Keywords physically-based simulation; mass-spring; leaf Background The authors’ work on weathering leaves is a part of research on realistic rendering of natural scene. Recent years, people mainly concentrate on the modeling of plant itself, but few researchers made deep investigation into changing shapes of plants through the changing weather or season. So the plants or leaves shape changing in the weathering process is almost a blank. The algorithm proposed in this paper gives out a solution to deal with leaves’ shape changing during autumn, although is just a algorithm for off-line computer. However, it could produce leaf shapes in high realistic. This work here could give a new algorithm to make leaf models for realistic rendering for natural scene, where we could get more beautiful and realistic result images and video especially in details of the scene to branches and leaves. The algorithm solves a branch problem of modeling of natural scene. Combined with the authors’ previews successful results of the realistic rendering of nature scene such as realistic rendering algorism and large scale scene rending, we could make a new real virtual world.