“Beyond procedurally modeled foliage in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” by Budsberg and Peterson
Conference:
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Title:
- Beyond procedurally modeled foliage in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
Session/Category Title: Many Things
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Abstract:
Developing vegetation to capture a very distinct and stylized art direction is a great challenge in computer cinematography. Completely procedural approaches constrain artists to model foliage by connecting nodes, modifying numbers, or writing code. On the other hand, manually placing thousands of branches is completely infeasible. Attempts at hybrid techniques have been inadequate, as they are still too biased towards procedural systems. Bonsai, our tree modeling tool for Madagascar 2, yields dramatic improvement in stylistic control over previous methods. Modelers use familiar modeling tools to create and connect small branch parts to form more complex networks, which can be connected or dynamically grown into a large hierarchical system of branches. More importantly, this allows the user to put shape language into every branch. Bonsai facilitates duplicating and manipulating thousands of branch surfaces to help artists create trees efficiently.
