Section: Overall Objectives

Animating nature

Most natural scenes are in motion. However, many of the animated phenomena that we can observe in nature have never been realistically, yet efficiently simulated in Computer Graphics. Our approach for tackling this problem is to increase and deepen our collaborations with scientist from other disciplines. From our past experiences, we believe that such interdisciplinary collaborations are very beneficial for both parties: they provide us with a better understanding of the phenomena to model and help us to get some input data and to experiment with the most recent models. On the other hand, our partners get interactive virtual prototypes that help them testing different hypothesis and enable a visual appreciation of their results. In particular, our aims are to:

• Improve interactive animation techniques for all kinds of physical models.

• Develop models for new individual phenomena.

• Work on the interaction between phenomena of different nature, such as forest and wind, sand and water, erosion (wind, water and landscape) or even eco-systems (soil, water, plants and animals).