Smooth Transition Between Different Plant Leaves Models

Foliage modeling and rendering is an important topic in virtual environment. Texture mapping and foliage simplification are usual solutions to forest navigation keeping leaf realism and with a fast speed. These two techniques are still used separately, so that their common advantages are not unified. A new technique is presented in this paper on a smooth transition between a textured leaf model and the one without texture by defining two functions: a leaf vein quadratic interpolation function and an implicit leaf contour function. The new foliage representation is a mixture of models with textures and models without textures, which is a balance between materials and geometry. Experiments demonstrate that our transition algorithm can be used as a continuous multiresolution representation of foliage, keeping high realism and high data compression in rendering plant foliage in large scenes.