Plant Leaf Modeling and Rendering Based-On GPU

The plant leaf modeling and rendering is one of the most challenging problem in virtual botany due to its complex morphological and optical characteristics. In this paper, we present a method of realistic leaf modeling and rendering. We extract the leaf outline and venation by using the algorithm of leaf image edge detection. The leaf was triangulated by using the optimization algorism of Delaunay mesh in order to deal with the vertex and morph the leaf edge. We can add some vertexes in the leaf skeleton which belong to venation skeleton. To generate the 3D leaf shape, we specify the z value of venation vertexes by hand-manipulating and modify the z value of neighbor leaf vertexes by using iterative method, which are located in the Delaunay triangulation mesh. An interactive leaf modeler was developed to help a user to model a leaf shape interactively. Different tree leaves were modeled by the interactive modeler. In order to improve the rendering frame rate, we present a group of leaves rendering method based-on leaf image Billboard by using vertex shader in GPU unit. At last, the leaf modeling case demonstrates that the proposed method is effective in the leaf shape modeling and rendering.