Friday, October 24, 2003
The Valley
The Valley
At university I had a professor called Robin Forrest, running the graphics course. With a nice sense of humour, he set a project to draw trees.
It's a little easier than you might at first think. Trees exhibit lots of rules as to how they grow. Do they branch in two or more? At what angle round the tree do the branches come off? How long is a branch compared to the previous branch? These are quite easy to code up, and you can draw the trees afterwards with a rendering package. A couple of displacements, and you can have the trees blowing in the wind. All this was 20 years ago.
Well, it looks like I wasn't the only one with the ideas. This site is a package that does the same. OK, its graphics are much better, but one can expect that in 20 years. It also looks like they have some nice randomisation to introduce some extra features into the system. The trunks are not linear for example.
At university I had a professor called Robin Forrest, running the graphics course. With a nice sense of humour, he set a project to draw trees.
It's a little easier than you might at first think. Trees exhibit lots of rules as to how they grow. Do they branch in two or more? At what angle round the tree do the branches come off? How long is a branch compared to the previous branch? These are quite easy to code up, and you can draw the trees afterwards with a rendering package. A couple of displacements, and you can have the trees blowing in the wind. All this was 20 years ago.
Well, it looks like I wasn't the only one with the ideas. This site is a package that does the same. OK, its graphics are much better, but one can expect that in 20 years. It also looks like they have some nice randomisation to introduce some extra features into the system. The trunks are not linear for example.