Procedural Generation and Rendering of Realistic, Navigable Forest Environments: An Open-Source Tool

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source tool for procedural generation and rendering of realistic, interactive forest environments, combining specialized algorithms and real-time rendering techniques for diverse applications.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized, open-source system that generates and renders realistic forests using L-systems, ecosystem simulation, and advanced rendering pipelines, filling a gap in proprietary tools.

Findings

Achieves high natural realism and visual appeal

Supports interactive scene generation for various applications

Balances realism with computational efficiency

Abstract

Simulation of forest environments has applications from entertainment and art creation to commercial and scientific modelling. Due to the unique features and lighting in forests, a forest-specific simulator is desirable, however many current forest simulators are proprietary or highly tailored to a particular application. Here we review several areas of procedural generation and rendering specific to forest generation, and utilise this to create a generalised, open-source tool for generating and rendering interactive, realistic forest scenes. The system uses specialised L-systems to generate trees which are distributed using an ecosystem simulation algorithm. The resulting scene is rendered using a deferred rendering pipeline, a Blinn-Phong lighting model with real-time leaf transparency and post-processing lighting effects. The result is a system that achieves a balance between high natural realism and visual appeal, suitable for tasks including training computer vision algorithms for autonomous robots and visual media generation.