Creation of Tree Models from Freehand Sketches by Building 3D Skeleton Point Cloud

Virtual trees are widely used in computer games, cartoons, and internet. In this paper, we propose a new method for tree modeling from sketches. The user draws several strokes to mark up main structures and crown silhouettes of a tree on two images as inputs, a realistic 3D tree can be constructed from sketches automatically and quickly. At first, a point cloud made up of approximate 3D skeleton points is built from sketches. Main branches are constructed by converting a 2D sketch into 3D using the point cloud as shape guidance. The whole tree is completed by adding small branches and leaves. We have demonstrate this method on a variety of examples.