Erika Camilleri
Path Planning for Natural Phenomena
Thesis Path Planning for Natural Phenomena
Abstract
The ability to create sufficiently detailed natural phenomena is important for building virtual environments, unfortunately this is a laborious task. Although various procedural techniques are available, new techniques that can ease the burden on digital artists are highly sought after. The use of path planning techniques that originate from artificial intelligence is a viable avenue for the generation of models resembling natural phenomena characterized by their dendritic nature such as plants, coral, trees and lightning. The technique involves finding the least-cost paths through a weighted graph from a single source to a number of destination points. This work presents a new method of informing the behaviour of the path planner through images in order to build models that emulate certain familiar objects. The effectiveness of the method is shown in three examples, two for trees and one for coral.