Synthesizing natural scenes with realistic vegetation has always been an interesting computer graphics research topic. Because they are frequent objects in our daily life, plants are required in almost all virtual scenes, ranging from single plants and trees to wide outdoor landscapes. But the human visual system is perfectly trained to see any imperfections or irregularities, so the appearance and inhomogeneous structure of plants still pose many challenges to computer graphics researchers. Modeling, rendering, transmitting, and storing realistic vegetation in rich, detailed virtual environments for games, movies, or urban visualization is beyond the capabilities even of modern graphics hardware.

This course covers the latest advances in plant modeling. Topics include: procedural and inverse-procedural modeling, biologically based approaches, data-driven modeling and reconstruction, user-assisted approaches for vegetation modeling, and unresolved issues in vegetation modeling.