Procedural Volumetric Modeling of Plant Branching Structures for Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

Precision agriculture, smart breeding, and agricultural robotics require accurate and automated plant modeling. These models provide high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) representations of plant architecture. They provide the geometric foundation for simulations of water and nutrient transport, light interception, structural loading, and crop lodging. Unlike static plant modeling pipelines, procedural modeling frameworks not only generate accurate 3D plant geometries but also support the generative modeling of crop diversity and the dynamic modeling of plant growth. While terrestrial laser scanning, LiDAR, photogrammetry, and neural reconstruction-based approaches have made 3D plant reconstruction possible, the resulting data are typically in the form of point clouds, which cannot be directly utilized for high-fidelity simulations. We present an automated volumetric procedural modeling framework for plant branching structures that generates analysis-suitable hexahedral meshes from input skeletons or 3D point clouds. The input skeleton is first converted into a rooted graph representation that captures the plant branching topology. Each graph edge is then represented by a smooth centerline B-spline curve, around which a cylindrical tensor-product B-spline volume is constructed. At each junction, incident B-spline volume control lattices are joined using blending operations. The resulting volumetric parameterization is evaluated to generate a smooth and conforming hexahedral mesh of the whole plant. We demonstrate the framework on three diverse plant datasets, namely mung bean, tomato, and walnut trees, generating meshes with both uniform and spatially varying branch radii. The framework also supports dynamic mesh generation suitable for modeling plant growth by locally updating newly added branches without reconstructing the full plant geometry.