3D Plant Research Partners
University of Konstanz
Prof. Oliver Deussen and his excellent computer graphics research group at University of Konstanz have accumulated a huge body of impressive research on 3D modeling of vegetation that we eagerly work on turning into powerful tools.
Promising research includes projects to interactively make intelligent edits which allow tree models adapt to their surroundings or to extract plausible growth steps. Make sure you check the project websites and watch the videos!
Capturing and Animating the Morphogenesis of Polygonal Tree Models
S. Pirk, T. Niese, O. Deussen, B. Neubert
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of Siggraph Asia), 2012
Plastic Trees: Interactive Self-Adapting Botanical Tree Models
S. Pirk, O. Št'ava, J. Kratt, M. Abdul-Massih, B. Neubert, R. Měch, B. Beneš, O. Deussen
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2012
Many more examples can be found on the Website of the Work Group Computer Graphics and Media Design.
NVIDIA Research
We are working with the fine folks of the NVIDIA Research Group at Advanced Rendering Center in Berlin, creators of the excellent mental ray® rendering software. Together, we are pushing the limits of computer graphics. This is fun, because we don't have to take as much care as we usually do to limit the amount of data we create, but can instead go wherever we want in terms of model complexity and visual quality. The future looks like it will be really fun (and good looking)!