Physically-based animation of plant motions

Alejandro Garcia

Abstract

The creation of realistic and lifelike plants has been a long-standing challenge in computer graphics. While significant progress has been made regarding the generation of plants using procedural methods, there is still a gap in understanding how to simulate their dynamics as efficiently and realistically as possible. One of the major challenges in this area is the incorporation of complicated non-inertial effects into plant motion. Previous works tend to either focus on quasistatic simulations - which by definition assume the absence of non-inertial effects - or ignore secondary motion in their dynamics calculations altogether. Either of these result in incomplete simulations that do not adequately capture the wide range of plant motion observed in nature. This is important because the human eye is keenly critical of inconsistencies in motion, meaning that incomplete models can easily appear off-putting and uncanny. To address these limitations, this thesis proposes a generalized and comprehensive physics model that aims to better capture the dynamics of procedurally-generated plants

Reference

Alejandro Garcia. "Physically-based animation of plant motions". M.Sc. thesis, University of Calgary, June, 2023.

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