OpenGL tree chopping demo

July 24 2003

Purpose of this project was to somewhat accurately recreate a common tree in OpenGL and animate its behavior.  As a bonus, the user would get to guide a little stick figure around and chop the tree down with an axe.  The project is written in C/C++ and is Linux and Windows compatible.

Step 1 - Was to determine the feasibility of recreating a tree in a 3-D modeling program.  A certain tree would have a single trunk on which various length branches grow on.  On those branches there are more branches, which contain leaves.  Logically, as the polygon count increases the transformation of the tree becomes less smooth in a computer model.

Figure 1 - Disc shaped leaves
Figure 2 - rectangular shaped leaves

As you can see from the figures, the desirable tree is the one that closely resembles its biological primer; however, that tree model contains far too many polygons for today's video acceleration equipment to handle in real-time.  For that reason programmers use tricks to represent flora in video games.

Step 2 - Is the code.. (soon to come)

..back to main page