Interactive synthesis of self-organizing tree models on the GPU

Abstract

Real-time synthesis of realistic tree models is a desirable functionality for computer games, simulators, and landscape design software. Self-organizing tree models that adapt to the environment are a welcome addition and central to various 3D design tools but present a challenging task for interactive use even on modern commodity hardware. The paper describes the implementation of a complete self-organizing tree synthesis method running on a contemporary graphics processing unit using OpenCL. We demonstrate that generation and display of tree-populated scenes with shadows at interactive rates can be achieved by utilizing the massively parallel GPU architecture to accelerate the computationally intensive steps of the method. A comparison with the performance of single-threaded and CPU-based OpenCL implementation of the same method is reported.