GPU Gems 3

Chapter 6. GPU-Generated Procedural Wind Animations for Trees

Renaldas Zioma Electronic Arts/Digital Illusions CE

In this chapter we describe a procedural method of synthesizing believable motion for trees affected by a wind field. The main goal of this approach is to enable the simulation and visualization of large open environments with massive amounts of vegetation. By introducing procedural animation calculations inside the vertex shader, this method works well with instancing and leverages the power of the GPU.

Introduction

Wind is an important element in creating believable and visually pleasant vegetation. The problem of simulating tree motion in a wind field is a complex, scientific topic. Most scientific approaches use physical simulation ...