Results Publications

Latest results - 30/09/2000

On the images below, different plants have been grown and the results of the lighting simulation have been accounted for during the process. The images themselves are not lighting simulations but just rendered views of the models we have obtained by the growing technique:

heliotropism heliotropism External shadowing Self shadowing


These images are screen shots of a lighting simulation computed in a scene build from poplar trees of various ages. The total number of input polygons is 1.2 millions. The algorithm only used 40MB of memory to compute the solution in 2 hours. A classical clustering method would have required more than 1 Go of memory for the same solution.



The following six images come from a growth 38 steps simulation of a plumeria lit by a local light source. They correspond to steps 1,7,15,20,25,30,35 and 37. On the last image the model of the plant as more than 400,000 input polygons and more than 30,000 leaves. The entire simulation took 2 days to complete, 99% of the computation time being dedicated to the last 4 steps (35,36,37,38) which, due to the exponential growth of the plant, contain many more structures than the first ones. At this stage, the lighting simulation is not anymore the bottle neck of the simulation due to the efficiency of the instanciation algorithm. The entire film can be accessed
here in uncompressed avi format.
Looking at these images, it appears clearly that the plant is influenced by the light source both in direction and power: in the first four images we see the plant orient itself toward the light source. At step 25 (image 5), the density of the foliage prevents light to reach the right parts of the tree thus causing a more and more noticeable deficit of vegetal matter production in this region.

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