Synthetic silviculture

Abstract

Due to the enormous amount of detail and the interplay of various biological phenomena, modeling realistic ecosystems of trees and other plants is a challenging and open problem. Previous research on modeling plant ecologies has focused on representations to handle this complexity, mostly through geometric simplifications, such as points or billboards. In this paper we describe a multi-scale method to design large-scale ecosystems with individual plants that are realistically modeled and faithfully capture biological features, such as growth, plant interactions, different types of tropism, and the competition for resources. Our approach is based on leveraging inter- and intra-plant self-similarities for efficiently modeling plant geometry. We focus on the interactive design of plant ecosystems of up to 500K plants, while adhering to biological priors known in forestry and botany research. The introduced parameter space supports modeling properties of nine distinct plant ecologies while each plant is represented as a 3D surface mesh. The capabilities of our framework are illustrated through numerous models of forests, individual plants, and validations.

Walking through the forests of the future: using data-driven virtual reality to visualize forests under climate change

“…The field of computer graphics has developed methods to model natural environments from individual plants to ecosystems. Sketch-based methods allow for modeling plants through artistic drawing (Wither et al 2009), while bio-inspired approaches can model plants and ecosystems based on biological processes (Makowski et al 2019, Kohek et al 2019. Plant models can also be created from images (Tan et al 2007, Neubert et al 2007, videos (Li et al 2011) and laser scanning (Zhang et al 2014).…”

SWIFT: Simulated Wildfire Images for Fast Training Dataset

“…They also used a modeling approach that utilizes Monte Carlo Markov chains to find optimal parameters and a polygonal model as input. Makowski et al [33] developed a project on the natural growth and simulation of a biome, from its bare land to the eventual formation of flora, following a completely procedural method. This method is capable of simulating up to 500,000 individual plants, with resource competition, diverse tropism, and other biological features.…”

“…Inspired by Makowski et al's work on biomes [33], three biomes that could be formed in ecological ecosystems found in Canada were developed, as shown in Figure 1: temperate and boreal forests, with their respective dense vegetation, and bare tundra for regions that suffer from extreme cold conditions. These biomes were generated using UE 5.2's new tool, PCG.…”

DeadWood: Including Disturbance and Decay in the Depiction of Digital Nature

“…Most previous methods focus separately on either plant modelling or ecosystem simulation to the detriment of both. A notable exception is the work of Makowski et al [2019] and its sequels [Palubicki et al 2022], which represent trees during both simulation and modelling as a collection of branch modules and also account for disturbance by fire [ Hädrich e t a l. 2 021] a nd w ind [ Pirk e t a l. 2014]. I n contrast, our approach supports larger-scale forests (with millions of trees), provides a separation between simulation and tree geometry instancing, and considers death and decay in detail (see Figure 1).…”