Procedural generation and interactive web visualization of natural environments

Abstract

Interactive 3D visualization of natural environments can help ecologists, policy makers and the broad public in general to better understand, promote and protect both existing and developing environments. The creation and exploration of virtual worlds can be very helpful for this purpose. However, current techniques are not able to generate sound complex natural environments from ecological data for the use of interactive webbased visualizations. In this thesis, we approach the challenge of developing and interactively visualizing in real time ecologically accurate and visually convincing models of complex natural environments over the web. For this, we propose a framework that (i) is able to combine landscape maps and ecological statistical data, translating them to an ecologically sound plant distribution, and (ii) creates a detailed 3D representation of the natural environment and provides for its fully interactive visualization in real-time over the web. The main contributions of this research are a procedural method to generate complete and sound natural environments and a web-based renderer that is able to real-time visualize complex natural environments with their high density and variability of individual organisms. The vegetation model combines and improves techniques from procedural ecosystem generation and neutral landscape modeling. It is able to generate diverse ecological sound plant distribution directly from landscape maps with statistics about coverage and patchiness of plant species. The visualization model uses several existing level-of-detail and illumination techniques to achieve interactive frame rates and improve realism. Validation of the results with ecology experts led us to conclude that our framework provides convincing interactive visualizations of large virtual natural environments.iii

Procedural modeling of plant ecosystems maximizing vegetation cover

“…Onrust el al. [33] presented a procedural plant placement technique that combines the Poisson Disk Distribution with Wang-tiles, thereby establishing an ecological modeling technique. Results were only tested with isolated plants that had problems with the position of the impostors with respect to the camera.…”

Ecologically Sound Procedural Generation of Natural Environments

“…The vegetation model is able to translate input landscape maps with statistics about coverage and patchiness of plant species to a sound and convincing plant distribution; and the visualization model supports rendering natural environments with high density and variety of plants. This article is a significantly extended version of a previous conference paper [4].…”

Procedural Generation of Natural Environments

“…Onrust et al [60] present a procedural plant placement technique that combines the Poison disk distribution with Wang tiles, establishing an ecological modeling technique. Results were only tested with isolated plants that had problems with the position of the impostors with respect to the camera.…”