Light Accumulation Map for Natural Foliage Scene Generation

Foliage scene generation is an important problem in computer graphics. Realistic virtual floras require simulation of real plant symbiotic principles. Among the factors that affect the spatial distribution of plants, lighting is the most important one. The change of seasons, geographic locations, and shading from higher plants will greatly affect the sunlight conditions for different plants in floras, which cannot be easily described with parameters. In order to generate natural foliage scene that accurately reflects the sunlight condition while maintaining efficiency, we propose a novel method named Light Accumulation Map (LAM) which stores sunlight receiving and occlusion information of each tree model. By calculating sunlight accumulation during one year at different latitudes, we simulate the sunlight occlusion effect of the tree model and store the occlusion result as LAM. Then, a LAM-based foliage generation algorithm is brought out to simulate accurate foliage distribution with different latitudes and seasons. The evaluation shows that our method exhibits strong adaptability in creating a lifelike distribution of foliage, particularly in undergrowth areas, across various regions and throughout different seasons of the year.