Happy Holidays

I'm back to doing some work in Processing, actually building on some of the older work drawing trees. This is for my holiday e-card, some nice fractal snowflakes. Saw a program on PBS about the history of fractals that got me all excited about them again. This program uses L-Systems to draw the recursive bits, and as kind of a hack draws 3 Koch Curves to make each Snowflake.










(click the image to see the sketch)

Processing Based Forestry

I've been building some Processing sketches to draw trees. This lead me to L-Systems (or Lindenmayer Systems) which are great rule-based formulas that can be used to draw patterns with natural looking forms. These same formulas can be used to describe natural growth and formations.

The most successful sketch to-date is this one. It's based on a sketch called "Hairball" that I found on a page belonging to W. Xavier Sneigrove. I've tweaked a bit of the code to make trees instead.









(click the image to see the sketch)

I hope to someday combine this with the bonsai hardware so it can display a unique naturalistic tree that's "grown" from software rather than a single 3D model that I labored over. This will definitely open up the possibility for the kind of slow interaction I'm hoping for as well. That the plant would grow more on the side facing a window during the day, or some kind of pruning or training. Something slow would be nice.

L-system Drawing

This Processing sketch features a truly l-system based plant. I haven't figured out how to "grow" this plant in the same way as the very curly other one. When you click in the window of this sketch it jumps another generation in the weed drawing formula.

Based on the l-system rule: (X → F-[[X]+X]+F[+FX]-X),(F → FF)
Example 8: Fractal plant from wikipedia