GPU-Based Wind Animation of Trees

Abstract

This paper present a simplified approach to wind animation of natural looking tree stems and branches. The presented approach is composed from several earlier works by a number of authors, each adapted to increase its suitability for processing on a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). The outlined approach uses two passes through the GPU. The first pass samples from a simple wind force simulator based on sine sums. It then animates the parameters and the control points defining each branch using the sampled force, taking advantage of the parallel nature of GPU s. The second pass uses a previously presented GPU-based deformer to generate and render actual models of each branch, using the animated control points.