Coherent Turbulence: Synthesizing tree motion in the wind using CFD and noise

• Main Author: Selino, Anthony Frank
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2011
• Subjects: Animation; turbulence; solid-fluid interaction; stochastic modeling; tree motion; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3015; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4014&context=etd

Animating trees in wind has long been a problem in computer graphics. Progress on this problem is important for both visual effects and biomechanics and may inform future work on two-way coupling between turbulent flows and deformable objects. Synthetic turbulence added to a coarse fluid simulation has been used to produce convincing animations of turbulent flows, but only considers one-way coupling between fluid and solid. We produce accurate animations of tree motion by creating a two-way coupling between synthetic turbulence and semipermeable proxy geometry. The resulting animations exhibit global wind sheltering effects and branch tips have motion paths which match paths collected from branch tips using motion capture.