Animating 3D vegetation in real-time using a 2D approach

In this paper, we propose a 2D approach for real-time animation of vegetation in 3D scenes, especially suitable for simulating wind effects on 3D vegetation fields with densely leaved foliage. We represent a vegetation field as view-dependent 2D billboard layers, perform a 2D harmonic motion simulation for modeling the dynamics of vegetation at the first layer (closest to the viewer), and utilize this dynamics to guide the animation of the rest of the layers while addressing the motion effects in depth and occlusion effects. As a result, our method can produce natural looking motions of vegetation swaying in wind comparable with existing commercial software, however the effort to setting up the underlying animation model and the computational cost can be significantly reduced.