Growing virtual plants for virtual worlds

Abstract

As plants are an inevitable part of our world, virtual plants are an expected part of a virtual environment. We present a method for creating, growing and visualization of virtual plants in the virtual world. Plants are created in the open-source 3D modelling platform GroIMP, which is based on growth grammars implemented as the programming language XL (eXtended L-system language). Textures created from photographs of the plants are used to enhance realism of the models.