Parametrical keyframe animation for maize growth simulation

The objective of the study was to develop a framework for the quantitative and visual simulation of growth process of maize to overcome the inadequacy of representing the detailed morphological formation in traditional plant growth simulation methods. The present work introduces a method for simulating the three-dimensional process of canopy and morphological development of maize integrating maize morphological knowledge models, parametric organ geometrical models based on morphological characteristic parameters and parametric keyframe technique. During simulation, a skeleton with joints was constructed firstly to drive the geometrical models. Parametric keyframe animation was then used to generate a smooth growth animation by interpolating the parameters of geometrical models and each keyframe parameters were acquired from the observed data. The experimental results show that our method generates a detailed growth animation and can be adapted to other crops.