Botanical Materials Based on Biomechanics
ACM SIGGRAPH 2017

People

• Bohan Wang
  University of Southern California
• Yili Zhao
  University of Southern California
• Jernej Barbič
  University of Southern California

Project material

• Paper (PDF, 14 Mb)
• Video (MP4, 143 Mb)
• Presentation (PPTX, 187 Mb)

Citation

• Bohan Wang, Yili Zhao, Jernej Barbič:
  Botanical Materials Based on Biomechanics, ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4)(SIGGRAPH 2017), July 2017. BIBTEX

Abstract

Botanical simulation plays an important role in many fields including visual effects, games and virtual reality. Previous plant simulation research has focused on computing physically based motion, under the assumption that the material properties are known. It is too tedious and impractical to manually set the spatially-varying material properties of complex trees. In this paper, we give a method to set the mass density, stiffness and damping properties of individual tree components (branches and leaves) using a small number of intuitive parameters. Our method is rooted in plant biomechanics literature and builds upon power laws observed in real botanical systems. We demonstrate our materials by simulating them using offline and model-reduced FEM simulators. Our parameters can be tuned directly by artists; but we also give a technique to infer the parameters from ground truth videos of real trees. Our materials produce tree animations that look much more similar to real trees than previous methods, as evidenced by our user study and experiments.

Comments, questions to Jernej Barbič.

Related projects

• Real-time Large-deformation Substructuring
• Interactive Authoring of Simulation-Ready Plants

Funding

• NSF (CAREER-1055035, IIS-1422869)
• Sloan Foundation
• Okawa Foundation
• USC Annerberg Graduate Fellowship to Bohan Wang

Disclaimer

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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