A Novel Approach to Simulate the Interaction between Grass and Dynamic Objects

-Grass animation plays an important role in various applications, such as virtual reality, computer games and special effects of movies. In recent years, varieties of approaches have been proposed to simulate the interaction between grass and the wind field. However, simulation of grass-object interaction is seldom involved due to the complexity of physical interaction and the high computational cost. In this paper, we present a novel method to animate realistic interaction between grass and dynamic objects. The representation of large-scale grassland relies on three different levels of detail that could reduce the rendering cost and still allow high-fidelity rendering of grasses close to the viewer. According to different levels of detail, two animation approaches are applied: physicallybased method, which deals with the deformation of geometricalbased grass blades that close to the viewer; procedural method, which handles billboard-based grass. Besides, seamless dynamic transition between different levels is taken into account. Experiments demonstrate our method not only can realistically simulate the interaction between massive amounts of grass and the dynamic object, but also can overcome the deficiencies of existing approaches. Key-Words: Grass Animation; Levels of Detail (LOD); Billboard; Collision Detection; Dynamic Simulation