Simulation of Morphology Changes in Drying Leaves

Abstract

We introduce a biologically motivated simulation technique for the realistic shape deformation of drying leaves. In contrast to skeleton-based leaf deformation, our approach simulates the whole leaf surface to capture the fine details of desiccated leaves. We represent a leaf as a triangulated double-layer structure that consists of a Delaunay triangulation discretized along the vein structure and its corresponding Voronoi diagram. This structure can generate not only sharp creases along leaf veins, but also the complicated curling and crumpling on the leaf surface. The loss of water is the major factor that controls the inhomogeneous shrinkage of drying leaves. The proposed osmotic water flow successfully models the gradual changes of dehydrated regions advancing towards the veins. We demonstrate the robustness of our method by comparing a sequence of simulated morphology changes with photographs of real leaves.