View-dependent pruning for real-time rendering of trees

Themainproblem in the real-timerenderingofvegetation is themassiveamountofprimitives tobe rendered. These primitives are needed to fully describe the geometry of the plants. However, some of them are not visible depending on the location of the viewer. This work focuses on this fact to interactively reduce the amount of geometry needed to represent the foliage through a view-dependent multiresolution scheme. Following a camera-dependent criterion, the less visible parts of the foliage are detected in real time, and rendered with a decreased level of detail for improving efficiency. This fact considerably reduces the extraction and the visualization timeof the geometry that represents the foliage. The novelty of the presented method is that its design is oriented to being efficient onmassively parallel architectures, such as the graphics processing unit. Moreover, we introduce a new management system for efficiently handling level of detail objects in order to improve performance for forest scenes. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.