Abstract
This thesis introduces a method for fast rendering of a forest scenery
in real-time. The subject of forest visualization has been an active
research field in real-time rendering and this paper draws on the
ideas and theory of previous work. The model that we employ is a hybrid
of different techniques used in terrain visualization and
the entertainment industry.
We can effectively divide this paper into two seperate parts. In
the first part we concentrate on building a forest model by
positioning trees in a landscape based on a quadtree. We
show how to build an hierarchical structure by placing trees in such a
manner that more trees are visible the further down the quadtree we
traverse. Methods for placing different treetypes in the terrain
and a dynamic memory scheme are also discussed.
The second part concentrates on the representation of trees in our
model. We introduce a discrete Level-of-Detail method for effective
visualization of thousands of trees by reducing the overall
polygon-count. To save memory we also show how the information
for a tree can be organized in an effective structure.
Since we are working within the bounds of real-time rendering, we
finally show how to visualize our model. By using alfablending we can
fade trees in and out of the landscape in such a fashion that we avoid
popping artifacts. Finally we introduce how height values can be
integrated into the our model.