PT Journal AU Weier, M Hinkenjann, A Demme, G Slusallek, P TI Generating and Rendering Large Scale Tiled Plant Populations SO JVRB - Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting PY 2013 VL 10(2013) IS 1 DI 10.20385/1860-2037/10.2013.1 DE Ecosystem simulation; Instantiation; Poisson Disc Distribution; Ray Tracing; Terrain rendering; Wang-tiles AB Generating and visualizing large areas of vegetation that look natural makes terrain surfaces much more realistic. However, this is a challenging field in computer graphics, because ecological systems are complex and visually appealing plant models are geometrically detailed. This work presents Silva (System for the Instantiation of Large Vegetated Areas), a system to generate and visualize large vegetated areas based on the ecological surrounding. Silva generates vegetation on Wang-tiles with associated reusable distributions enabling multi-level instantiation.This paper presents a method to generate Poisson Disc Distributions (PDDs) with variable radii on Wang-tile sets (without a global optimization) that is able to generate seamless tilings. Because Silva has a freely configurable generation pipeline and can consider plant neighborhoods it is able to incorporate arbitrary abiotic and biotic components during generation. Based on multi-levelinstancing and nested kd-trees, the distributions on the Wang-tiles allow their acceleration structures to be reused during visualization. This enables Silva to visualize large vegetated areas of several hundred square kilometers with low render times and a small memory footprint. ER