Interactive Physical Based Animation of Tree Swaying in Wind

Lots of researches have been done on computer animation of tree swaying in wind. Some of them employed artificial simplification methods which could not achieve faithful swaying motion, others adopted complicated physical principles which would involve vast computation and fail to get an appropriate rendering speed. This paper presents a series of convenient interactive physical based methods for animation of trees swaying in wind. We focus on both the faithful swaying motion and the appropriate rendering speed. Therefore, a lot of statistical curves, representing wind profile loaded in tree or stem displacement profile and so on, are introduced for swaying motion calculation. All those curves can be modified interactively to get best match with the researches of botanists and other experts. These methods can be adjusted quickly and conveniently to simulate the animation of faithful tree swaying in wind with proper engineering accuracy and effective computation.