Rendering trees has always been a headache for animators. Tree move in irregular ways, so  natural looking motion is hard to achieve. It is so expensive that traditional animation often use static trees - except in big-budget films. In computer graphics, tree models are just as hard to produce.

This works shows is it possible for users to make models of trees just by filming one. All a user has to do is draw around the tree outline, in the first frame only.  Then our system makes a model of the tree.  More than that, the user can produce new trees of the same variety, each one an individual. These model trees can be inserted back into real video, they can be rendered in any season, or drawn to give a cartoon like appearance. What is more these trees move - the natural motion of the original tree is reproduced too - and users can control that movement to create strong winds, they can even make the trees dance to music.

Team: Chuan “Chris” Li, Peter Hall

a cartoon tree

four seasons

tree varieties: a single video input on left, four siblings on the right

show reel

This show reel is 81.4 Mb