Abstract
The popularization of virtual reality technology has become a brand-new carrier of knowledge and information dissemination and a new tool for art creation and design teaching in Colleges and universities. In this paper, first of all, from the three aspects of the definition and characteristics of virtual reality technology, the integration of virtual reality technology into art design teaching, and the significance of using virtual reality technology in art design teaching, the reform of art creation and design teaching in Colleges and Universities under virtual reality technology is discussed. In order to carry out the application research, this paper then chooses to carry on the simulation modeling teaching of the bamboo forest in the intelligent virtual reality environment, making full use of the intelligent modeling tools, rendering tools and mapping tools to complete the teaching application examples of the art modeling design in Colleges and universities. In the specific teaching of art creation and design in Colleges and universities, the creation and design modeling of individual bamboos, the creation and design modeling of bamboos forest, and the creation and design modeling of different lighting effects and scene rendering are carried out respectively. Finally, from the advantages of intelligent virtual reality technology in art creation and design of colleges and universities, the expansion and promotion of teaching resources, and the synergistic effect of teaching results, we analyze the strategies of art creation and design teaching in Colleges and Universities under the background of intelligent virtual reality technology in detail.
Keywords
Introduction
Definition and characteristics of virtual reality technology
The meaning of computer generated reality innovation. Computer generated reality innovation is an innovation ascending with the advancement of science and innovation as of late [1]. It is a comprehensive and practical technology. It integrates sensory technology, computer technology, simulation and other information technology, and generates extremely realistic environment through calculation. Characteristics of virtual reality technology. Specific. Concreteness is that virtual reality technology can show the effect that users expect more concretely and vividly, so that the design scheme in the designer’s mind is not just in the mind, but through virtual reality technology, this idea can be truly reflected in people’s eyes, and provide a series of visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic and other sensory experiences [2]. Participation. Participation is another feature of virtual reality technology. It is precisely because of its participation that virtual reality technology has more special advantages than other information technology. The so-called participation means that when users use this technology, they can not only watch it outside the virtual reality technology project, but also participate in the specific implementation process of the project, and even become an integral part of the virtual reality project. When the technology plays a role, they feel the existence and important role of becoming project participants. Interactivity. Interactivity refers to the operability of virtual reality technology users to and the degree of operation in the virtual environment. The forms of interactivity generally include behavioral interaction and visual interaction. When behavioral interaction occurs, the experiencer can interact with things in the virtual environment through body movements, so as to produce sensory experience [3]. Visual interaction refers to the interaction between the experimenter and the image in the virtual environment, which makes the environment in the virtual reality, like the real environment, produce different perspective changes and experiences according to people’s different behaviors.
Explore how to integrate virtual reality technology into the teaching of art design course
Through virtual reality technology to stimulate the design inspiration of students in art design course. At the beginning of any kind of art design, it needs the designer’s constant conception and repeated experiments to realize [4]. Only after repeated modification, can the designer’s ideal design effect be finally obtained. In the classroom, teachers can guide and encourage students to use this technology in the project design. Using virtual reality technology can greatly improve the efficiency. When students are not satisfied with their own scheme, they only need to modify it on the computer to achieve the modified scheme presentation. In the course of art design, virtual reality technology is used to simulate the design situation. The art design teaching based on virtual reality technology will be more flexible, practical and authentic. In the teaching activities of art design course, because of the intervention of virtual reality technology tools, many new teaching methods will come into being. Through this teaching method, students can deepen their understanding of the content of art design course, understand the specific methods of art design more concretely and sensibly, and carry out timely practice and practice in the virtual environment to consolidate the learned design knowledge in time.
The significance of using virtual reality technology in art design teaching
First of all, the use of virtual reality technology in art design teaching is conducive to enhance the interaction between teachers and students, activate the classroom learning atmosphere, and enhance the enthusiasm of students. In the classroom, teachers can use virtual reality technology to teach art design [5]. In the process of teaching, teachers can give full play to their subjective initiative, guide students to design and create in virtual space in combination with their own understanding of the knowledge taught by teachers in art design course and their own implementation ideas of art design scheme. In the process of design and creation, students can interact with teachers at any time, which changes the situation of students’ passive reception of knowledge in the traditional art design classroom, so that students can have their own thinking after listening to the class, that is, to exercise students’ ability of independent thinking, as well as their ability of exploration in the design world. Students can also carry out simulation practice according to their own wishes. In the process of this practice, teachers and students can freely realize the communication and exchange in the process of forming artistic design results. Teachers can understand the learning progress of this student and the degree of mastering artistic design knowledge according to the performance of students. Under communication between students and teachers is constantly increasing, increase the understanding between teachers and students, but also create an active learning atmosphere in the classroom, and greatly enhance the enthusiasm of students in the art design course.
Secondly, the use of virtual reality in art design course is conducive to stimulate students’ creative thinking, improve students’ ability of independent thinking in art design, and stimulate students’ more design inspiration. Using virtual reality technology to study art design can further emancipate students’ thoughts and stimulate their creative thinking. The process of art design needs design thinking and continuous innovation of designers [6]. By using virtual reality technology, students are placed in a virtual environment. Students are relatively independent in their own virtual environment, so that they can concentrate on finding design schemes to solve problems, think about and explore methods to solve design problems independently, and try to achieve different schemes to solve design works. The relatively closed virtual environment can avoid the interference of some outside world to the design ideas, and create good conditions for students’ inspiration and design ideas.
One of the advantages of virtual reality technology is that it can create or reproduce some things in the virtual environment, and present the abstract concepts that only exist in people’s thinking in the form of concrete and sensible. In the theory of art design major, like other professional theories, many theories are very abstract. It is not easy for some students to fully understand these theories, and virtual reality technology can effectively avoid this situation in teaching [7]. Some abstract theories in the textbook are transformed into practical design cases, which are presented in front of the students for the students to understand and analyze, to help the students understand these abstract knowledge, and to transform them into concrete practical cases, which not only reduces the resistance of the students to learn the content of art design course, but also simplifies the abstract concepts and complex knowledge, and helps the students to The understanding of knowledge in art design course is more profound and thorough.
Fourth, the use of virtual reality technology in art design courses is conducive to a more three-dimensional presentation of the effect of art design products, and also conducive to improving the quality of art design [8]. In the traditional art curriculum design process, most of the students’ design works are presented in renderings or on computer screens. In this way, the presentation of art design works is often limited in a certain plane space. For the art designers in the process of creation, designers can rotate their works at any time in the virtual environment, and check whether their design has defects or other areas that need to be improved from different perspectives, so as to continuously improve the design quality and efficiency.
The application of virtual reality in the teaching of art creation and design in colleges and universities
In order to verify the general necessity and feasibility of intelligent virtual reality technology in art creation and design teaching in Colleges and universities. In this paper, we choose to carry out the simulation modeling teaching of Fengwei bamboo forest in the intelligent virtual reality environment, and make full use of the intelligent modeling tools, rendering tools and mapping tools to complete the teaching application examples of art modeling design in Colleges and universities.
Modeling design of artistic creation of single bamboo
Blade manufacturing
Modeling is the foundation of 3D landscape animation. All scenes and characters in the virtual world need to build their basic structure and shape through 3D animation software [9]. The high-precision model (HMM) is a single model with complex structure and large number of faces, which can represent a variety of object details. High mode can make the scene look more realistic and significantly improve the detail richness of the scene, but high mode can greatly improve the rendering time at the expense of rendering speed. Because the plant model is composed of a large number of plant leaves and roots and branches without morphological regularity, in order to achieve high reality of plant scene simulation, the traditional modeling method is bound to need high model as support [10–12]. When dealing with forest scale plant models, the memory and processor of desktop computers will not be able to bear the burden of rendering forest composed of high number of plants. As shown in Fig. 1, the rhizome and stem of bamboos are evergreen with small leaves and drooping clusters, which are an important part of vegetation in XiShuang BanNa.

Fengwei bamboo forest.
This paper proposes a method to replace the high model leaf model with a single leaf model. In this method, the transparent channel map and diffuse map are used to fit, and the single slice model with the blade edge as the display edge is obtained. The transparent channel map used for fitting is a binary black-and-white image of the same size as the original image. The black pixel part returns a logical value of 0, representing the hidden display, and the white pixel part returns a logical value of 1, representing the display. In order to get the blade contour in the transparent channel map [13].
After preprocessing, the collected photos of bamboo leaves are cut into 64 pixel ×64 pixel images I (x, y) for edge detection. In this study, edge detection method based on Canny operator [14] is used. Canny operator is an edge detection method based on gradient information of image. Before image edge feature extraction, there may be noise in the image. Therefore, a Gaussian filter (1) is applied to the original image to get a slightly smooth image I′ (x, y), which can eliminate the interference of a single noise pixel to the whole image. Where the symbol “*” represents convolutional operation:
Using Sobel operator formula (2) and (3) of edge detector, the horizontal component d
x
and the vertical component d
y
of pixels are calculated respectively:
Thus, the edge gradient and direction can be determined by formulas (4) and (5):
After getting the gradient value and direction, the edge line is tracked by the hysteresis threshold [15]. Compared with the light intensity gradient with small value, the light intensity gradient with large value is easier to be the edge line. Two thresholds are used to define the high and low boundaries. Assuming that all the edges should be free from noise and continuous, a high threshold is set to determine the edge of the curve. Then, the direction information is used to track those traceable image edges. When the edge is tracked, the region with edge can be tracked by using low threshold until the starting point of the next curve is found. As shown in Fig. 2, the binary image obtained after edge feature extraction and the bamboo leaf image fitted with the original image are shown.

Extraction of bamboo leaf image.
Because of the small shape of bamboo leaves, it has a high reliability. Compared with the single leaf model and single leaf model, the high modulus details of single leaf can be expressed by single leaf model. In order to add as much detail as possible to the blade, it is not enough to rely on the diffuse map alone. In the virtual light environment, the single-sided blade model will reflect the light according to the uniform scale, and the light and shade will not change on the blade surface. Therefore, based on the diffuse map, we need to add a layer of specular map. The specular map is a gray-scale image based on diffuse reflection image [16]. When the light hits the specular map, the specular map will return the continuously changing pixel value within the range of [0 255] to reflect the light. All the points with the pixel of 255 will reflect, and all the points with the pixel of 0 will absorb the light without any reflection. As shown in Fig. 3, the highlight map of a single patch bamboo leaf model.

Highlight map of bamboo leaf.
Through the continuous comparison and improvement of the leaf shape, leaf distribution, model surface number and other factors of the bamboo model, three schemes were successively used to make the branch model of the bamboo.
Scheme 1 makes multiple groups of single leaf models with different shapes, and divides them into several groups, each group is composed of several bamboo leaves [17]. Although the number of model patches is reduced by using a single patch leaf model, a large number of single blades also impose a heavy burden on the computer due to the large number of leaves and bamboo. In order to reduce the number of leaves as much as possible, the leaves are evenly arranged on the branches in groups, forming the branches of bamboos as shown in Fig. 4.

Scheme 1 bamboo model.
Scheme 2 uses a conical cylinder plane as a basic model of a cluster of bamboo leaves, and randomly arranges different forms of bamboo leaf maps on the plane [19]. As shown in Fig. 5.

Ring bamboo leaf.
The map is horizontally distributed on the surface of each trapezoid, and the number of scattered bamboo leaves is controlled by adjusting the UV information of the map [18]. The size of bamboo leaves is controlled by the size of each layer of model, and the sense of hierarchy of bamboo leaves is realized by basic operations such as rotation, displacement, scaling, etc. of the model, so as to obtain the branch model of bamboos as shown in Fig. 6.

scheme 2 bamboo model.
Compare scheme 1 and scheme 2 to get the comparison results as shown in Table 1.
Performance comparison between scheme 1 and scheme 2
Scheme 1 ignores the relationship between each group of bamboo leaves. The shape of each group of bamboo leaves is too single, the visual effect is not ideal, and the space between each group of bamboo leaves is too large, which is not consistent with the real bamboos. Even in the case of improving the distribution of bamboo leaves (adjusting the random distribution by mathematical models such as dispersion), the results cannot simulate the shape of Bambusa in the natural environment with high authenticity. The number of patches per plant is about 2600, which is unacceptable in the scene of nearly 100 plants in this paper.
Scheme 2 is very close to the real shape of bamboos in the side view, but in the 45° camera view, it shows a serious problem (Fig. 7) [20]. No matter how to adjust the position of the taper plane, this method can’t avoid the dead effect of “overlapping rings”, and there will be a big gap in the center. After adding the simulation of light environment, this disadvantage is obvious.

45° visual angle effect.
The mapping method of the cone-shaped ring seems to greatly reduce the number of faces of a single model, but it is not. After balancing the number of faces and the requirements of the final effect, the number of faces of a single bamboo model was adjusted to 2100. Compared with scheme 1, the model of 2100 faces per plant is improved, but the target within 1000 faces is far from ideal.
In order to improve the problems and defects exposed in scheme 1 and scheme 2, scheme 3 enhances the diversity and flexibility of patches on the basis of minimizing the number of patches. The specific implementation scheme is to increase the number of leaves on the patch on the basis of the single side blade model, so that both the number of maps to be read in memory and the number of model faces are greatly reduced. At the same time, the number of patches is expanded to 6, and the nodes of patches are enhanced to improve the flexibility of morphological change, as shown in Fig. 8. In this method, the three-dimensional model free change method (FFD) is used to transform the shape of the face piece [21]. Through the spatial relationship of the three-dimensional coordinates of the image, with the help of bilinear interpolation operation, the model is projected into the box space, and the shape of the face piece is adjusted by the nodes on the box, so as to realize the three-dimensional transformation of the model.

Scheme 3 bamboo leaves.
In order to simulate the sense of interlacing and layering of bamboo leaves (Fig. 9), six groups of leaves with 30 faces and five maps are used to form a cluster of bamboo leaves, which presents a complex and diverse shape. Different from scheme 2’s coning cylinder surface, this method is very controllable for each cluster of blade models. Scheme 3 has about 700 pieces per plant, which meets the expected number of pieces.

Scheme 3 blade model framework.
Compared with scheme 1 and scheme 2, scheme 3 not only greatly improves the shape, distribution and photo reduction of bamboos, but also greatly reduces the number of bamboos and achieves the expected number of bamboos. In order to further compare the calculation efficiency of the model scheme, under the condition of simulated light environment, 100 bamboos were tested in the time range of single frame and 100 frame respectively according to the preset split lens. The configuration of the test desktop is: Intel ® core TM i7 extreme processor; 16 GB memory; NVIDIA ® GeForce ® GTX 770 with 2 gbgddr5. The test results are shown in Table 2. It can be clearly seen from the table that scheme 3’s memory consumption and rendering time are significantly less than scheme 1 and scheme 2, no matter it is a single frame or a hundred frame rendering.
Calculation efficiency test of three schemes
On the basis of scheme 3, in order to better simulate the natural environment and realize the simulation of bamboo forest with high authenticity, the concept of time domain and the influence of natural factors is added to the bamboo forest. In the time domain, due to the different age and growth state of each bamboo in the bamboo forest, the contrast and shade of bamboo color were adjusted (Fig. 10), so that the performance of each bamboo in the bamboo forest was more abundant.

Multi-colors bamboo leaf map.
In the aspect of natural environment simulation, the effect of wind force is added in the animation stage, so that the bamboo leaves can swing with the wind. In addition, we creatively simulated the gravity effect through the bending degree of the branches of bamboos, and established a corresponding relationship between the bending angle and the number of leaves. Every 10 leaves increased, the bending angle increased by 5°. In this way, the irregular and intricate bamboo leaves show a hidden natural relationship, and the sagging and weight sense of “Phoenix Tail” is shaped. The final shape of the high-precision simulation of Impatiens is shown in Fig. 11.

The final effect of the bamboo model.
The time of the bamboo forest scene is set as the early morning when the sun rises, and the weather environment is set as the sunny day after the rain. Because the bamboo forest is located on the Bank of the river, the bamboo forest scene will present a hazy feeling of fog. In the misty woods, the light usually shows a cool color mainly blue, and the shadow edge is soft. However, the light changes rapidly in the early morning, and the color temperature rises rapidly from 2000 K at sunrise to about 3500 K to 4500 K [22], and the angle between the sun and the ground is small in the early morning, so the obvious “Tindal effect” can often be seen in the forest (Fig. 12).

Tindal effect.
The simulation of lighting environment is one of the important links to determine the final effect of animation. In landscape performance, the final color, shade, saturation, contrast and simulation degree of the scene depend on the simulation of light environment. The rendering speed of a single frame of animation is not only related to the number of model faces, the number and size of maps, but also to the type and number of lights. According to the lighting requirements of animation, the research objectives of high simulation, and the limitations of computer hardware, three levels of main light, auxiliary light and environment light are used to simulate the lighting effect of real environment.
The main light source is used to simulate the sunlight and adjust its light source angle, brightness and color to the feeling closest to the sunlight in the early morning. When the sun rises in the early morning, the angle between the sun and the ground is small, and the angle will affect the length of the shadow. The color is set to orange with high brightness. Since the light is not very strong in the early morning, the light intensity of the main light source is about 70% of noon.
Auxiliary light is used to illuminate the area of the shade that cannot be illuminated by the main light source. This is because in the real environment, natural light will be reflected countless times, and the area of the back Yin can also be seen in the daytime. However, the number of light reflections in 3D animation software is set artificially [23]. The more bounces, the slower the computer operation will be. If the number of model faces increases, the operation time will be multiplied. Therefore, the auxiliary light is used to directly illuminate the area of the back shade to restore the light of the natural environment. Figure 13 gives the effect of coordinative opening of main light and auxiliary light.

Main light and auxiliary light effect.
The third layer of illumination system is ambient light simulation. In natural environment, due to the reflection of light between objects, complex lighting effects will be produced, which cannot be simulated with a single main light source and auxiliary light used to illuminate the area of the back shade. The ambient light simulation scheme of “light array” is used to set up 36 spatial angles from 12 directions of 0°, 30° and 60° included angle with the ground respectively to form a light array. Figure 14 shows the layout of the ambient light array.

Ambient light array.
In order to achieve a high degree of authenticity of bamboo landscape simulation, in the field survey, it is found that the “Tindal effect” is a common effect in the early morning bamboo environment [24]. Its essence is the light column that sunlight projects to the ground through the space of bamboo leaves. Therefore, through controlling the changes of parameters such as shape, color and attenuation of volume light, through repeated testing and evaluation, we finally got the “Tindal effect” bamboo landscape.
Fog effect simulation
In the weather environment of sunny morning after rain, the landscape of Fenway bamboo forest will present hazy smoke. Add fog effect to bamboo forest scene from two aspects. On the one hand, the water mist produced in the bamboo forest itself, on the other hand, the vision of the human eye in the fog will show attenuation changes, that is, the farther away from the eye, the lower the visibility. Through the simulation of atmospheric environment and the method of adding fog effect attenuation to the camera, the atmosphere of smoke around the intersection of the two layers is realized (Fig. 15) [25]. After the main light, auxiliary light, environment light array and special light effect are all turned on, the simulation effect of Impatiens bamboo forest as shown in Fig. 16 is finally realized.

Simulation of Tindal effect and fog.

Final effect of Fengwei bamboo forest.
Advantages of intelligent virtual reality technology in art creation and design of colleges and Universities
Digital media art design major is a multi-disciplinary interdisciplinary major with art design as the core. The goal of training is to have comprehensive talents with high-level technology and artistic literacy. With the support of digital information technology and the popularization advantage of visual portable devices, digital media art has changed the past single TV, radio and paper media, and added a simulation and interactive virtual reality communication mode. Virtual reality technology, as the cutting-edge technology of the new generation of information technology, has a great prospect of leading a new round of industrial and technological innovation. It urges the society to demand more strict talents of digital media art creation and design. Based on this, the teaching mode of digital media art design major in Colleges and universities needs to be innovated and improved in time to improve the comprehensive ability of college students.
As an interdisciplinary subject combining computer science and art, digital media art creation and design is developed with the popularization of technology. At present, although many colleges and universities in China have set up this major, its curriculum system is also set up from two aspects of art design and science and technology, but it is still in the primary stage of development. With the frequent update of computer technology and related hardware and software equipment, for digital media art, a major closely related to technology, its relevant curriculum system must keep pace with the pace of the information age, and actively make optimization and innovation.
Virtual reality is a new model integrating high and new information. The technology of information dissemination is quite different from the single way of reading in the past. Virtual reality technology unifies the system composed of the generated environment, organism’s senses, natural communication mode and sensing equipment into one unit, including audio-visual sense, touch, smell, vision, etc. it changes the information transmission of reading and writing in the past, and enables users to mobilize five senses and six senses and quantify information acquisition in the simulated environment. Virtual reality emphasizes that people are the leading factor, and users interact with digital environment in the world created by virtual system, and obtain information and perception from the world constructed by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.
Expansion and promotion of intelligent virtual reality technology in art creation and design resources of colleges and universities
In the traditional teaching of digital media art, the teaching content can only be transmitted by words, oral descriptions and pictures, so the teaching effect is not good. In view of this, the teaching content can be digitized, and the teaching resource database based on virtual reality technology can be established, which can improve the efficiency of searching resources for students. What’s more, the immersive and interactive experience brought by virtual reality can let students really enter the learning state. For example, in the theoretical course teaching of digital media art, according to the knowledge points, create the corresponding virtual scene, establish the works of Yousman and Langjingshan [26], let the students experience the space size, virtual reality, collection and release of the works from the perspective of wandering, truly become the participants in the classroom, stimulate the desire for knowledge, and then with the explanation of professional teachers, To achieve the goal of quantitative learning, break the teaching problems caused by the multiple factors of thinking solidification, time and space. In addition, such as MOOC excellent courses, academic lectures, cutting-edge design fashion, etc. can be established through virtual reality technology, and introduced into the teaching of digital media art creation and design. Under the background of information technology, according to the characteristics of digital media art creation and design, the application of virtual reality technology can further enhance its learning effect, so as to promote and realize the high-quality expansion of teaching resources.
The synergism of intelligent virtual reality technology in the teaching results of art creation and design in colleges and universities
First of all, the display method of scene representation of virtual reality technology is helpful to improve and cultivate students’ artistic imagination and design creativity. The traditional classroom teaching form is single, such as the introduction of virtual reality technology, according to its three-dimensional space, the function of creating virtual situation, creating interesting classroom atmosphere and improving classroom efficiency [27]. Secondly, human-computer communication of virtual reality technology can adjust the state of learning. In traditional classroom teaching, because of many force majeure factors, students’ learning state is often not in the best state. To solve these problems, the digital technology and virtual reality equipment of computer can realize efficient guidance, make the teaching process interact organically, and provide instant and accurate guidance for students’ learning. Third, virtual reality technology can improve the evaluation system of teaching. Virtual reality technology can realize the evaluation standard of software skill proficiency, avoid the deviation of single manual evaluation, and achieve the rationalization of professional practical skill evaluation. The objective characteristics of virtual reality technology provide a method for the guidance of teaching practice, and it can also avoid the problem of students’ self-esteem and enthusiasm by the regular classroom scores, and take the objective data as the verification standard.
Conclusion
Using virtual reality technology in art design course is not only the innovation and exploration of art design course teaching, but also the innovation and exploration of art design education teaching means. Virtual reality technology can make students grasp the content of art design course more comprehensively and profoundly. The virtual environment created by virtual reality technology can concretize and visualize abstract concepts, make the presentation of art design works three-dimensional and multi-faceted, and stimulate students’ interest and inspiration in learning art design course through interesting scenes, so as to improve students’ ability Positive. In order to verify the general necessity and feasibility of intelligent virtual reality technology in art creation and design teaching in Colleges and universities. In this paper, we choose to carry out the simulation modeling teaching of Fengwei bamboo forest in the intelligent virtual reality environment, and make full use of the intelligent modeling tools, rendering tools and mapping tools to complete the teaching application examples of art modeling design in Colleges and universities. With the advent of the digital era, the talent gap of digital media art creation and design specialty is increasing. The introduction of virtual reality technology into its professional teaching system is the need of the development of design education. The society urgently needs professional knowledge reserve personnel with digital technology to join the construction team. At present, colleges and universities need to study the teaching system of virtual reality in the digital media art major and cultivate high-quality professional talents according to the actual situation and the training goal of digital application talents. It can be predicted that virtual reality technology is another important teaching system after multimedia teaching, which will greatly enhance the professional characteristics of digital media art.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This paper support by Ningxia colleges and universities first-class discipline construction (educational discipline) funding project Project Number: NXYLXK2017B11
