Panagiotis D. Ritsos

MEng PhD Essex, FHEA

Senior Lecturer in Visualization

XReality, Visualization and
Analytics (XRVA) Lab

Visualization, Data, Modelling and
Graphics (VDMG) research group,

School of Computer Science
and Engineering,

Bangor University,
Dean Street, Bangor,
Gwynedd, UK, LL57 1UT

Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games

Teaser for Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games

Abstract

A handful of approaches have been previously proposed to generate procedurally virtual forestry for virtual worlds and computer games, including plant growth models and point distribution methods. However, there has been no evaluation to date which assesses how effective these algorithms are at modelling real-world phenomena. In this paper we tackle this issue by evaluating three algorithms used in the generation of virtual forests – a randomly uniform point distribution method (control), a plant competition model, and an iterative random point distribution technique. Our results show that a plant competition model generated more believable content when viewed from an aerial perspective. We also found that a randomly uniform point distribution method produced forest visualisations which were rated highest in playability and photorealism, when viewed from a first-person perspective. Our results indicate that when it comes to believability, the relationship between viewing perspective and procedural generation algorithm is more important than previously thought.

Downloads

  PDF

Citation

B. R. Williams, P. D. Ritsos, and C. Headleand, “Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games,” in Proceedings of the Eurographics Conference in Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2019, Bangor, UK, 2019.  doi:10.2312/cgvc.20191259
  Best Student Paper

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Williams-et-al-CGVC-2019,
  author = {Williams, Benjamin R. and Ritsos, Panagiotis D. and Headleand, Chris},
  title = {Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eurographics Conference in Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2019, Bangor, UK},
  year = {2019},
  month = sep,
  publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
  editor = {Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.},
  doi = {10.2312/cgvc.20191259}
}