Simulation of Climbing Plants with Twining Behaviour

Abstract

Vegetation simulation in computer graphics is a highly active research area due to its vast variety of applications. Among various types of vegetation, climbing plants are complex to simulate because of their rigid and soft body characteristics. Though state of the art models were able to simulate the climbing plants in a visually realistic manner none of them was able to simulate the biomechanical behaviors of the twining plant. As twinning plants which is a subcategory of climbing plants show abstract mechanical properties, a robust biomechanically accurate model will facilitate many other research areas and it will fill the void on visualizing point of interest scenes of twining plants growth in gaming and cinema industries. Previously, an attempt to fill the void in this area was made by Gunawardhana et al. their proposed model was jittery and it lacked stability. The proposed research was initiated as a continuation of this previous attempt with an aim to synthesize a robust model that can simulate a twining plant in a biomechanically accurate manner by improving the previous model. However, this approach had to be rejected due to its limitations and a state machine driven particle-based novel model was proposed instead. This novel model was able to simulate the effect of circumnutation behavior, twining behavior, seed germination process, secondary growth, and leaf growth in a biomechanically accurate manner. The proposed model was evaluated in terms of realism and performance using a survey and standard performance evaluation measures.