Authoring Consistent Landscapes with Flora and Fauna

Pierre Ecormier-Nocca (1) , Guillaume Cordonnier (2, 3, 4) , Philippe Carrez (5) , Anne‑marie Moigne (6) , Pooran Memari (1) , Bedrich Benes (7) , Marie-Paule Cani (1)

1 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]
2 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
3 GRAPHDECO - GRAPHics and DEsign with hEterogeneous COntent
4 UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur
5 Immersion Tools
6 HNHP - Histoire naturelle de l'Homme préhistorique
7 Department of Computer Science [Purdue]

We present a novel method for authoring landscapes with flora and fauna while considering their mutual interactions. Our algorithm outputs a steadystate ecosystem in the form of density maps for each species, their daily circuits, and a modified terrain with eroded trails from a terrain, climatic conditions, and species with related biological information. We introduce the Resource Access Graph, a new data structure that encodes both interactions between food chain levels and animals traveling between resources over the terrain. A novel competition algorithm operating on this data progressively computes a steady-state solution up the food chain, from plants to carnivores. The user can explore the resulting landscape, where plants and animals are instantiated on the fly, and interactively edit it by over-painting the maps. Our results show that our system enables the authoring of consistent landscapes where the impact of wildlife is visible through animated animals, clearings in the vegetation, and eroded trails. We provide quantitative validation with existing ecosystems and a user-study with expert paleontologist end-users, showing that our system enables them to author and compare different ecosystems illustrating climate changes over the same terrain while enabling relevant visual immersion into consistent landscapes.

Mots clés: Natural Phenomena; Ecosystems

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Pierre Ecormier-Nocca, Guillaume Cordonnier, Philippe Carrez, Anne‑marie Moigne, Pooran Memari, et al.. Authoring Consistent Landscapes with Flora and Fauna. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2021, ⟨10.1145/3450626.3459952⟩. ⟨hal-03245206⟩