Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games

Abstract

A handful of approaches have been previously proposed to generate procedurally virtual forestry for virtual worlds and computer games, including plant growth models and point distribution methods. However, there has been no evaluation to date which assesses how effective these algorithms are at modelling real-world phenomena. In this paper we tackle this issue by evaluating three algorithms used in the generation of virtual forests - a randomly uniform point distribution method (control), a plant competition model, and an iterative random point distribution technique. Our results show that a plant competition model generated more believable content when viewed from an aerial perspective. We also found that a randomly uniform point distribution method produced forest visualisations which were rated highest in playability and photorealism, when viewed from a first-person perspective. Our results indicate that when it comes to believability, the relationship between viewing perspective and procedural generation algorithm is more important than previously thought.