l-systems: the algorithmic beauty of plants
DESCRIPTION
Slides from a presentation I gave on L-systems and computational botany for the ArkFab Collective. I provide an overview of the history and applications of L systems, a concise formal-language description of plant structure and development. My perspective is to separate them into topological 'genotypes', which are the specific formal system, and geometric 'phenotypes', which are the CGI interpretations of the genotype strings. Finally, I add a few thoughts of my own for further directions to take the concept.TRANSCRIPT
L Systems: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
Charlie Soeder – TopologicOceans.wordpress.com
'Save the Corals, Maaaan.'
L Systems
Due primarily to Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz
Concise descriptions of plant form
CGI applications Other applications?
Genotype
The 'topological' end of an L System involves:
An alphabet of symbols (eg, [a,b])
A set of production rules (eg, ['b->a', 'a->ab'])
A starting axiom (eg, b) Iteration
Phenotype
The 'geometric' end of an L System involves:
Interpretation of symbols and strings
Turtle-style graphics, typically
Branching symbols – think push and pop
F → FF[+F][-F]FF
So what?
Easy CGI
Run through the space of genotypes and phenotypes to generate imagery
Applications to Botany?
As a quantitative descriptor of plant geometry
Phylogenetic trees Connecting molecular
biology to plant morphology
Fractal geometry Modelling leaf venation
Algorithmic Botany: http://algorithmicbotany.org/
Further Reading
THANK YOU WORKERS!!!