Rule and reuse based lightweight modeling and real time web3D rendering of forest scenes

Abstract

How to model and visualize a large scale forest scenes in a realistic and lightweight way keeps to be an important problem in Web3D Game and VR applications. This paper presents a novel solution to real time Web3D visualization of huge forest scenes. The data size of huge forest scenes is reduced to very low level by reusing some branches repetitively, thus, which can be transmitted over mobile Internet and rendered Web3D browsers instantly. However, the visual morphology and shaping variety of huge forest scenes can still be preserved with more straightforward hierarchical rules than L-System. From one sampling tree, we can extract it rules and grow them randomly to model large scale virtual forest scenes and render them lightweightly at Web3D browsers. Experimental Results show our proposed method outperform the existing Web3D forest modeling and rendering methods in terms of data volume, shaping polymorphism, networking bandwidth and Web rendering and achieves instant Web3D visualization of huge forest.