Software creates life-like animated trees

The technique could be used by animators and computer games designers to automatically generate realistic trees that move in a natural way.

Most computer games and animations have a static background, or use a large team of animators to painstakingly draw each tree individually.

Dr Peter Hall and Chris Li, of the university’s Department of Computer Science, have developed a program that will let the computer ‘watch’ video footage of a tree to enable it to make computer animations that mimic the way branches and leaves move in the wind.

The user simply has to draw around the tree outline in the first frame of the video. The program then makes a model of the tree and tracks how the leaves and branches move in the video.

It then uses algorithms to copy this movement and can use this information to ‘grow’ lots more trees that are all slightly different.

Hall said: ‘Rendering trees has always been a headache for animators. Trees move in irregular ways, and it’s very hard to achieve natural-looking movement. It is so expensive that traditional animation often uses static trees — except in big-budget films. In computer graphics, tree models are just as hard to produce.’