Real time falling leaves

There is a growing interest in simulating natural phenomena in computer graphics applications. Animating natural scenes in real time is one of the most challenging problems due to the inherent complexity of their structure, formed by millions of geometric entities, and the interactions that happen within. An example of natural scenario that is needed for games or simulation programs are forests. Forests are difficult to render because the huge amount of geometric entities and the large amount of detail to be represented. Moreover, the interactions between the objects (grass, leafs) and external forces such as wind are complex to model. In this paper we concentrate in the rendering of falling leafs at low cost. We present a technique that exploits graphics hardware in order to render thousands of leafs with different falling paths at real time and low memory