Animation of plant
development (final project for cs229)
If a natural object or organism demonstrates consistency
of form [...], such symmetry is the consequence of Something rather than
Nothing.
-Adrian D. Bell
For 229 final project I studied L-systems that have been extensively
used for generating plants, and implemented L-systems engine which generates,
parses and displays L-strings. It includes the following capabilities:
-
Extended 2D and 3D turtle interpretation
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Parametric L-systems
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Context-sensitive L-systems
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Exporting pre-defined models of plant organs as meshes in sm-format
I also implemented a simple version of the algorithm from the
paper for animating plants which combines discrete and continuous
models of plant development. The system can be used for simulating growth
process of several kinds of plants.

Paper (gz)
Final report (pdf)
Presentation slides (pdf)
Links
Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer, "The Algorithmic
Beauty of Plants". Springer Verlag 1990.
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/bmv/vmm/section08.html
http://www.vterrain.org/Plants/
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljlapre/