Visual Patterns in the Plant Kingdom

There has been a lot of progress in modeling and rendering elements of our Natural World for computer graphics tasks. In the Plant Kingdom, techniques for modeling the visual patterns presented in many natural objects (such as stripes on a watermelon) have advanced far less than methods for modeling the shape and reflectance properties of individual or large collections of elements (such as leaves and trees). In this paper we explore a procedural model for synthesis of many familiar visual patterns from the Plant Kingdom. Our results show that in this context a procedural model has advantages over other texturing techniques such as texture mapping and procedural noise, since these patterns are usually needed in great quantity, and at least for some plants, with many geometric variation, assigning consistent texture coordinates is a challenge. We show results for fruits, mushrooms, and small decorative plants.