Tree Model Simplification for Fast Interactive Rendering (sap 0254)

Although billboards are often used in representing trees and grass of natural scenes, they are only suitable for distant objects, which are far away from the camera viewpoint. Human visual perception can point out billboards under close examination of such objects. In addition, a moving camera viewpoint around the objects further takes out the realism as some billboards are often programmed to rotate along the camera’s viewing direction. In this on-going research, we consider rendering techniques built upon a 3D tree model and focus on geometrical simplification algorithms, which are used to save the rendering effort while keeping the visual quality close to that of a full tree model. Some recent research efforts [Lee et al. 2007] have tried to address this problem under the context of viewdependent rendering. Here, we generalize the framework so that a simplified tree model can be observed from different angles through user interaction.