Real-time Rendering of Dynamic Vegetation

This paper presents a new approach to shading realistic leaves at high frame rates. The proposed physically based translucency model allows the accurate simulation of subsurface scattering in leaves while accounting for the leaf micro-structure. This approach is based in the local frame of the leaf, so it can be instantiated to any number of leaves without needing to generate new data. Besides rendering leaves in a realistic way, a method is proposed to animate trees in wind in a physically based and efficient manner. This method allows the bending of branches as well as the movement of individual leaves according to the wind. A small set of parameters allows an artist to tweak the appearance of the animation to her liking in real-time.