Expressive Illumination of Foliage Based on Implicit Surfaces

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for vivid representations of foliage based on implicit surfaces. It approximates the complex lighting interaction within the foliage and enables a clear illustration of its general shape and local density, thus supporting the three-dimensional depth cue of the viewer. Due to its straightforward implementation as a preprocessing step that only adjusts the normal vectors of the geometry, this method has no additional memory requirements during the rendering process, and is especially applicable to real-time visualizations.