GOING WITH WIND──PHYSICALLY BASED ANIMATION OF TREES

Trees play the most important role in the natural scenery of landscape. It is surely magnificent in many fields if we could physically simulate the waving motion of trees by computers. Unfortunately, due to the high level complexity of the structure of trees and the highly varying properties of trees' components, physically based simulation of trees' motion becomes extremely a difficulttask- As an effort in tackling such a problem, a solution has been proposed and implemented in thepaper. By this solution in the control and simulation of the motion of trees blown by wind, the behavior of moving branches of trees is simulated based on the contemporary non-linear mechanics,and that of waving branches based on the principle of mechanical wave. A test example of animation created solely by a primary graphics library is provided to show the feasibility of the approach.