Rendering Trees with Indirect Lighting in Real Time

Abstract

High quality lighting is one of the challenges for interactive tree rendering. To this end, this paper presents a lighting model allowing real-time rendering of trees with convincing indirect lighting. Rather than defining an empirical model to mimic lighting of real trees, we work at a lower level by modeling the spatial distribution of leaves and by assigning them probabilistic properties. We focus mainly on precise low-frequency lighting that our eyes are more sensitive to and we add high-frequency details afterwards. The resulting model is efficient and simple to implement on a GPU.