Authoring consistent landscapes with flora and fauna

Abstract

circuits, and a modified terrain with eroded trails from a terrain, climatic conditions, and species with related biological information. We introduce the Resource Access Graph, a new data structure that encodes both interactions between food chain levels and animals traveling between resources over the terrain. A novel competition algorithm operating on this data progressively computes a steady-state solution up the food chain, from plants to carnivores. The user can explore the resulting landscape, where plants and animals are instantiated on the fly, and interactively edit it by over-painting the maps. Our results show that our system enables the authoring of consistent landscapes where the impact of wildlife is visible through animated animals, clearings in the vegetation, and eroded trails. We provide quantitative validation with existing ecosystems and a user-study with expert paleontologist end-users, showing that our system enables them to author and compare different ecosystems illustrating climate changes over the same terrain while enabling relevant visual immersion into consistent landscapes.CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Procedural animation.

Real-Time Locomotion on Soft Grounds With Dynamic Footprints

“…To this end, we need to adjust the system so that the total mass of the character is correctly distributed based on a variable number of contact points with the ground. Having such low-level deformations on the terrain could help us better recreate the long-term impact of virtual animals on natural environments, as an extension of Ecormier-Nocca et al (2021).…”

“…At a large scale, terrains are subject to diverse natural phenomena, from the erosion due to sun and water that break and transport ground material (Cordonnier et al, 2017) to the action of wind that piles up sand dunes (Beneš and Toney Roa, 2004) and snow deposit, which creates smooth landscapes (Cordonnier et al, 2018). The effect of moving characters was little studied at such scale, with the exception of skiers leaving tracks and causing avalanches in snow-covered landscapes (Cordonnier et al, 2018) and of the generation of eroded trails due to fauna (Ecormier-Nocca et al, 2021). In both cases, simple textures were used as track models, and none of these works studied the two-way interaction between a deforming ground and a moving creature.…”

Ecoclimates

“…In computer graphics, modeling plant ecosystems has a long tradition [Deussen et al 2002[Deussen et al , 1998Jaeger and Teng 2003;Lane and Prusinkiewicz 2002], that more recently also encompasses complex physical simulations, such as required for modeling wildfires , erosion feedback , or the interaction with fauna [Ecormier-Nocca et al 2021]. The goal of many of these methods is to employ detailed geometric representations to faithfully simulate the underlying physical or biological processes.…”