Environmental Modeling
Environmental modeling aims to represent the structure and dynamics of complex natural and man-madeenvironments, capturing how physical and biological processes evolve over time. This includes modeling weather systems, vegetation such as trees and forests, urban form, and interconnected ecosystems. These environments are inherently dynamic and multi-scale, shaped by interactions between atmosphere, terrain, living organisms, and human infrastructure, making accurate and efficient modeling a fundamental challenge.
The objective of environmental modeling is to enable predictive, interactive, and physics-based representations that support analysis, decision-making, and learning. By modeling phenomena such as weather dynamics, tree growt, and ecosystem processes, these approaches provide a foundation for understanding environmental change and for coupling environments with embodied agents. Such models are essential for studying climate impacts, urban sustainability, and ecological resilience, as well as for creating realistic, responsive worlds in which intelligent systems can perceive, act, and learn.
Selected Publications:
B. Li, N. Schwarz, W. Pałubicki, S. Pirk, D. L. Michels, B. Benes, Stressful Tree Modeling: Breaking Branches with Strands, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Papers (SIGGRAPH Conference Papers 2025)
[Website], [Preprint], [Video]
X. Zhou, B. Li, B. Benes, A. Habib, S. Fei, J. Shao, S. Pirk, TreeStructor: Forest Reconstruction with Neural Ranking, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2025
[Website], [Preprint], [Video]
J. A. Amador Herrera, J. Klein, D. Banuti, W. Pałubicki, S. Pirk, Dominik, L. Michels, Thunderstruck: Visually Simulating Electrical Storms, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2025).
[ArXiv], [Preprint], [Video]
B. Li, N. Schwarz, W. Pałubicki, S. Pirk, B. Benes, Interactive Invigoration: Volumetric Modeling of Trees with Strands, ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2024
[Website], [Preprint], [Video], [Bibtex]
J. A. Amador Herrera, J. Klein, D. Liu, W. Pałubicki, S. Pirk, Dominik, L. Michels, Cyclogenesis: Simulating Hurricanes and Tornadoes, ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2024
[Website], [Preprint], [Video], [Bibtex]
X. Zhou, B. Li, B. Benes, S. Pirk, DeepTree: Modeling Trees with Situated Latents, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2023
[Website], [Preprint], [ArXiv], [Video], [Bibtex]
W. Pałubicki, M. Makowski, W. Gajda, T. Hädrich, D. L. Michels, S. Pirk, Ecoclimates: Climate-Response Modeling of Vegetation, ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2022
[Website], [Preprint], [Video], [Bibtex]
T. Niese, S. Pirk, M. Albrecht, B. Benes, O. Deussen, Procedural Urban Forestry, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) and SIGGRAPH, 2022
[Website], [Preprint], [Video], [Bibtex]