Terrain Guided Multi-Level Instancing of Highly Complex Plant Populations

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate how todays ray tracing techniques can be applied to photo-realistically render extremely huge landscapes covered with trees and forests, where a user can freely choose between highly detailed close-up views or flyover scenarios. This is made possible by mapping a number of square sub-scenes onto a huge polygonal terrain during run-time. The full plant population results from the combination of these tiles, which are iterated over the terrain. This is demonstrated at the example of a highly complex, plant covered ecosystem containing trillions of triangles