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I have been working on an application to generate trees in preparation for my term project in Object Oriented Programming (flash) and Designing Physical Interfaces. It has been a lot of work and not the easiest to say the least; especially in as3. However, I recently had a bit of a breakthrough.

Using the stochastic L-System rule set (aka random chance of different rules being applied) given on this site about simulating plant growth, I generated the below flash application. I apologize as it may take some time to load and run as the tree generation process can take some time. The current recursion level is set to 12.

As you can tell, some of the trees are far better than others. Some, in fact, look like bushes or half-deformed creations. Ahh, the joys of generation… I find the whole plant tends to look better around 15 recursions, but that takes a bit too long to run! In any case, the setup of this file breaks down into 4 main sections. A FLA to start the process, a tree class, a branch class and a leaf class. The tree class is identifiable by the dark brown, the branch by the light brown and the leaf by the green. At the moment, the only item that is randomized is the rule set, although the decay on recursion (currently the tree class has the most decay of -4), the angle of extrusion (here set to around 20 degrees) and the length (currently 2, but dependant on the recursion level) can also be randomized. Another item I would like to add in is a decay on the length so that the tree trunk is the thickest all the way down to the smallest branch.

So much to do! Please look forward to it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Flash, Work Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.