Guided Ecological Simulation for Artistic Editing of Plant Distributions in Natural Scenes

In this paper we present a novel approach to author vegetation cover of large natural scenes. Unlike stochastic scatter-instancing tools for plant placement (such as multi-class blue noise generators), we use a simulation based on ecological processes to produce layouts of plant distributions. In contrast to previous work on ecosystem simulation, however, we propose a framework of global and local editing operators that can be used to interact directly with the live simulation. The result facilitates an artist-directed workflow with both spatially and temporally-varying control over the simulation's output. We compare our result against random-scatter solutions, also employing such approaches as a seed to our algorithm. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach within an iterative authoring workflow, comparing it to typical artistic methods.