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Tree Animation for A 3D Interactive Visualization System For Hurricane Impacts

Conference Paper · August 2005

DOI: 10.1109/ICME.2005.1521494 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 TREE ANIMATION FOR A 3D INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION SYSTEM FOR
HURRICANE IMPACTS

Peter A. Singh1, Na Zhao1, Shu-Ching Chen1, Keqi Zhang2

1
Distributed Multimedia Information System Laboratory, School of Computer Science
Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
2
International Hurricane Research Center, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
1
{psing002, nzhao002, chens}@cs.fiu.edu, 2zhangk@fiu.edu

ABSTRACT the storm or maps of areas that may experience flooding

due to storm surge. Unfortunately, the charts and maps
This paper describes an implementation of vertex that are often used do not convey the personal impact that
weighting for real-time animation of 3D trees as a result of people can suffer. We believe our system will help in
wind force and direction. This method improves over educating people to the possible dangers of a storm, by
similar techniques because it incorporates individual showing them how it may directly affect them and their
branch animation on 3D models, whereas previous works homes. We do this by recreating locations where a
perform animations on the model as a whole or use planar hurricane may strike and animating storm related
billboards to visualize the tree. Our tree animation is used phenomena such as storm surge, rain, and wind effects on
in an interactive system that visualizes the effects caused objects such as plants and buildings.
by a hurricane’s impact on a virtual city. The system uses
The focus of this paper is the implementation of tree
models created with 3D Studio Max and the animations
animation related to hurricane force winds where the trees
are implemented in OpenGL and the nVidia Cg shader
are modeled as 3D objects rather than planar billboards.
language.
There is an abundance of work related to creating and
rendering plant life [2][4][5], but very little with regard to
animating it. Jeff Thelen’s “Blustery Trees” demo [8]
1. INTRODUCTION
performs tree animation with respect to wind, but it is
limited to bending the tree model as a whole. Our
Keeping the general public informed to the dangers of
implementation creates animations for the tree trunk and
natural disasters, such as hurricanes, is difficult for
individual tree branches. This method is ideal for soft
emergency planners. If there are long stretches of time
branches, such as those on palm trees, which are common
where a hurricane does not strike land, the inhabitants tend
in the locations we have modeled. In addition, our
to become complacent and ignore the warnings from the
implementation also takes advantage of modern
officials. This was the case in 1992 when many people
programmable graphics cards to efficiently animate many
ignored the warnings of the impending danger of
highly detailed models in real-time.
Hurricane Andrew. It was also the case in 2004 when
many people misinterpreted the dangers of Hurricane This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses
Charley, believing that it would impact only a specific area the techniques used in our proposed model for tree
to the north, the citizens of Port Charlotte did not prepare animation. This includes the vertex weighting technique,
and as a result they suffered devastating consequences. lighting technique, the programmable graphics pipeline,
However, as a result of the damage caused by Charley, and how they are applied in our tree animation model. The
many people throughout the state responded by over- conclusion is given in Section 3.
preparing for the following three storms even though they
were not in the projected paths. This limited the 2. TREE ANIMATION
availability of emergency supplies for affected people. In
the case of hurricanes, most people receive their In earlier versions of our system, we have implemented
information from their local meteorologist on the evening vegetation animation using planar billboard models of
news. Generally, this involves the standard weather trees [1]. Planar billboards are simple to implement and
graphics involving radar imagery and projected paths of consume very little computing resources, but they do not
provide realistic models at close ranges. The lack of Q2, Q3, & Q4). If the wind comes from a different angle,
details in the model only allows us to perform simple say 210º, then the quadrants can be rotated 30º counter-
rotation operations to pivot the tree trunk or branches at clockwise to be positioned properly. Or, if the wind comes
their base. However, billboard models are preferable at from 150º, then the quadrants would be rotated 30º
distances further away from the camera, where the lack of clockwise.
details is not so readily noticeable to the user. Our
objective is to animate the bending and swaying of trees,
yet save the computing power by using models with
varying levels of details. Less detailed models, including
planar billboards, will be displayed further away from the
viewing camera.

2.1. Vertex Weighting

Our solution to bending the 3D tree models is using a

technique known as Vertex Weighting or Vertex Skinning.
It was developed to animate human skin around joints
such as elbows and knees [6]. Using traditional animation
of rigid bodies, sharp seams and gaps would appear when
animating joints. Vertex Weighting provides a smooth Figure 1. Branch angles separated into quadrants
bending around these areas by having each point on the
skin reacts to the underlying bone structure. When a set of The next step is to calculate what angle, with respect
bones pivot at a joint, the vertices on the surface react to the wind direction, that each branch will bend to if it
accordingly depending on the influence each bone exerts were to bend at its maximum angle. This maximum angle
on them. The new position of a vertex is calculated by is arbitrarily defined, so that the resulting animation is
taking this influence into account by assigning each bone a visually pleasing. In our case, if a branch were pointing
weight value. Equation 1 shows how the new vertex directly into the wind, for example having an angle of 180º
position, v’, is calculated. Mi is the transformation matrix (Q3) with the wind also coming from that direction
that represents the ith bone. Our implementation only uses (flowing towards 0º), then the branch will bend forward
rotation transformations about the z-axis, which points in 120º so that its new angle is 300º. This is only in the
the “up direction” for our scene. wi is the weight value extreme case, generally branches falling in Q1 and Q4 will
assigned to the ith bone, c is number of bones, and v is the have new angles in the range of ±[0, α2], and those falling
original vertex position. The linear weighting method is in Q2 and Q3 will have new angles in the range of ±[α2,
used when assigning values to the individual bone weights. (α2+α1)] as shown in the shaded region of Figure 1. The
This means that the sum of all weights used should equal values of α1 and α2 depend on how much we want the
one. Values other than one can be used, but they result in branches to bend. In our case, α1=10º and α2=20º. Larger
shearing or twisting effects. values may be used for sturdier trees so that α1+α2≤180º.
c c
v′ = wi M i v with wi = 1 BA′′ = Wind Direction − BranchAngle
i i
BA′′ BA′′ − 90
Q1 : BA′ = × 20 Q 2 : BA′ = × 10 + 20
90 90
Equation 1. Calculating the new vertex position [7]
BA′′ − 270 BA′′ − 360
Q3 : BA′ = × 10 + 20 Q 4 : BA′ = × 20
90 90
2.2. Applying Vertex Weighting to the Model
Equation 2. Calculating the branch angle
To apply Vertex Weighting technique to our tree model, BA′ 1 − 2x / L x≤L
B1 = ROTZ − BA′ + w1 =
we simulate three interconnected bones for the tree trunk 7 0 x>L
and each branch. The bones are laid out in a similar 1 x = L/2
fashion to that of a human arm, with an upper arm, B2 = ROTZ (− BA′) w2 = 1 − w1 x≤L
forearm, and wrist. We then take into account the direction 1 − w3 x>L
of the wind with respect the angle of the branch to BA′ 1 − 2x / L x ≤ L
B3 = ROTZ − BA′ + w3 =
determine how each branch will bend. As shown in Figure 7 0 x>L
1, if we assume that the wind is coming from the west
Equation 3. Bone transformation formulas
(180º), each branch will fall into one of 4 quadrants (Q1,
 To apply these concepts to the tree model, we present
Equations 2 and 3. Equation 2 lists a set of equations that 2.3. Programmable Graphics Pipeline
are used to calculate the new branch angles based on
which quadrant the branch is in. We then use these angles One of our main goals is to implement a system that
in Equation 3 to calculate the three bone transformation performs in real-time on a single consumer level computer,
matrices per branch. ROTZ signifies that each Bi is a so we must always search for ways to reduce the workload
rotation matrix about the z-axis. wi is the weight value for on the CPU. Unfortunately, the vertex weighting method is
ith bone, which is dependent on the position of the vertex, computationally expensive. Fortunately, we can alleviate
x, along the branch length L. this problem because many modern consumer graphics
cards now come equipped with a programmable graphics
Our models are created in the 3DS format in 3D
pipeline. This allows a developer to take advantages of
Studio Max. Each branch contains information embedded
hardware implementations of common 3D graphics
within the model of its length (L) and the angle ( ) that it
operations.
is attached to the trunk with respect to the XY-plane as
shown in Figure 2. Also shown in this figure is the same Figure 4 depicts the graphics pipeline of a modern
branch with vertex weighting applied to it as a result of the GPU. The top four components are the standard graphics
wind coming from two different angles. pipeline while those two components on the bottom of
Figure 4 are the programmable parts of the pipeline
consisting of the vertex and fragment processors. A
programmer can take advantages of the vertex and
fragment processors by writing vertex and pixel shaders.
However, when doing so, certain sections of the standard
pipeline are bypassed. We implemented the Vertex
Weighting method as a vertex shader with the nVidia Cg
language [9]. Cg is a C-like language specially designed
for vertex shaders. Integrating a Cg shader with our system
is seamless because nVidia provides a runtime
Figure 2. Branch bending due to wind direction environment that allows them to be integrated into C++
and OpenGL [10] programs, where our system is
developed.

Figure 4. Programmable graphics pipeline [3]

Figure 3. Tree bending with different LOD models
2.4. Lighting
By applying rotation transformations to the trunk and
branches of a Royal Palm tree model, we can bend them to One aspect of using the programmable pipeline is that the
varying degrees simulating the effects of high winds. A programmer must perform the operations that are bypassed
great advantage of using this technique is that it is not in the standard pipeline. This includes lighting operations
limited to 3D models. It may also be applied to planar- that give the objects their 3-dimensional appearance. The
billboards as long as there are enough polygons to bend. lighting model that we use to perform these operations is
This allows us to create multiple models of the same tree, the diffuse lighting model. Each vertex in a model has an
but with varying levels of details (LOD). Figure 3 shows associated material property for ambient (MatAmbient),
this application to the 3D model of a Royal Palm tree. The diffuse (MatDiffuse), and specular light (MatSpecular). A set of
first image is the model with no bending applied. The material coefficients, d and s for the diffuse and specular
second and third images are wire-frame versions of the components respectively, are calculated using the Light
tree with different levels of details. The tree in the middle (L), Normal (n’), Half (H), and View (V) vectors. These
contains over 30,000 polygons. The tree on the right coefficients are then multiplied with the material
contains approximately 1,500 polygons. properties and a final color (ColorFinal) is computed, as
 shown in Equation 4. The equation for n’ is related to produce realistic animations on a single workstation level
Equation 1 for calculating the new vertex position. Figure computer. This system’s intended application domain is as
5 depicts the vectors used in the lighting calculation, and an educational tool for the citizens who live in hurricane
Figure 6 depicts the tree animation with and without affected areas. Visualizing possible damage effects by a
diffuse lighting applied to it. storm in an affected area will allow people to make better
informed decisions as to whether they should evacuate or
c
T
c
not. Tree animation is a component of ambient details that
n′ = wi M i−1 n with wi = 1
i i adds to the overall experience of the virtual environment.
ColorFinal = Mat Ambient + (MatDiffuse × d ) + (MatSpecular × s )
s = (H • V )
2 4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
d = L • n′
Equation 4. Calculating the normal [7] and color [3] This research project was supported in part by a grant
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA).

5. REFERENCES

[1] S.-C. Chen, K. Zhang, and M. Chen, “A Real-Time 3D

Animation Environment for Storm Surge,” In Proceedings of
the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
(ICME 2003), Baltimore, MD, USA, July 6-9 2003, pp. 705-
708.

[2] O. Deussen, C. Colditz, M. Stamminger, and G. Drettakis,

“Interactive Visualization of Complex Plant Ecosystems,” In
Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2002, Boston, MA,
Figure 5. Calculating diffuse lighting [3] USA, October 27-November 1, 2002, pp. 219-226.

[3] R. Fernando, M.J. Kilgard, The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive

Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics, Addison-
Wesley, Boston, MA, USA, February 2003.

[4] M. Fuhrer, H. W. Jensen, and P. Prusinkiewicz, “Modeling

Hairy Plants,” In Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004,
Seoul, Korea, October 6-8, 2004, pp. 217-226.

[5] P. Prezemyslaw, A. Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of

Plants, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY, USA, April 1996.

[6] R. Woodland, “Filling the Gaps: Advanced Animation Using

Stitching and Skinning,” Game Programming Gems, Edited
Figure 6. Tree model with no lighting (left) and with by M. DeLoura, Charles River Media, Rockland, MA, USA,
diffuse lighting applied (right) September 2000, pp. 480-483.

[7] S. Domine, “Mesh Skinning,”

3. CONCLUSION http://developer.nvidia.com/object/skinning.html

In this paper, we described a method to implement 3D tree [8] J. Thelen, “Blustery Trees,”
animation using the vertex weighting technique. Our http://edgarapoe.home.mindspring.com/quixotic/blustery_tre
implementation, in addition to performing trunk animation es.htm
in a similar fashion to the “Blustery Trees” demo [8], also
[9] NVIDIA Cg Toolkit,
performs animation for the individual tree branches. The http://developer.nvidia.com/cg
animation is implemented in OpenGL and the nVidia Cg
language. With the Cg language, we have taken [10] OpenGL,
advantages of the programmable graphics pipeline http://www.opengl.org
available in modern graphics cards. This takes the
computationally intensive operations performed in vertex
weighting from the CPU to the GPU, allowing us to

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