Simulation of forest environments has applications from entertainment and art
creation to commercial and scientific modelling. Due to the unique features and
lighting in forests, a forest-specific simulator is desirable, however many
current forest simulators are proprietary or highly tailored to a particular
application. Here we review several areas of procedural generation and
rendering specific to forest generation, and utilise this to create a
generalised, open-source tool for generating and rendering interactive,
realistic forest scenes. The system uses specialised L-systems to generate
trees which are distributed using an ecosystem simulation algorithm. The
resulting scene is rendered using a deferred rendering pipeline, a Blinn-Phong
lighting model with real-time leaf transparency and post-processing lighting
effects. The result is a system that achieves a balance between high natural
realism and visual appeal, suitable for tasks including training computer
vision algorithms for autonomous robots and visual media generation.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Computer Graphics Forum (CGF). The
application and supporting configuration files can be found at
https://github.com/callumnewlands/ForestGenerato