benighted wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm pretty new to POV (Well, I did mess some with it about 5 years ago (You
> know the standard RSOCP's and so on =))) and a first time poster on the
> forums,   and have been playing around with POV a month or so and love it.
> 
> I got so impressed with Norbert Kern's Vegetation Simulation WIP's so I
> thought I had to have a go at it (as I a long time have had a plan to make
> some artificial life simulator with a (simple) ecosystem and this was a
> first simple step in that direction). So this Sunday i sat down and wrote a
> simple program in C++ that does a simulation with 8 species with different
> water requirements, growth rates, maximum size and so on. And then added a
> export capability that wrote a povray include file with the plants as
> objects with size and position and a randomized rotation (to get some
> variation within a species as i use the same mesh for all the plants within
> a species).
> 
> Yesterday night I sat down a hour or so and made these extremly simple
> plants only using Gilles Tran's lovely Makegrass macro, and a shrub/tree
> just exported from Arbaro, and then let my computer chew on it overnight.
> This is the result of this, and I'm pretty pleased with the result, although
> it would be nicer if I had more variation on the plants, but this will come
> with time.
> 
> I will, if I have the time, make the software more user friendly (as it is
> now one has to change the source code to change anyting in the program),
> and more advanced. And if there is an intrest make it available as a open
> source program if it gets good enough and there is a intrest, but no
> promises that it will ever get to that point =)...
> 
> 
> Some facts about the image:
> The simulation in my program took about 1 minute which created 4342 plants,
> the parsing time was 16 sec and it rendered in 1h 21m, peak memory used
> 236MB.. The computer is a Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB memory..
> 
> In the image you can se the species differentiated by colour and height (the
> blueish green high plants are water loving, and the darker green really
> short
> tufts are dry loving, the other species are in between these in size and
> colour (and in preference for soil conditions). The surface is just a simple
> cosine function in the z direction and the wetness depends on the height of
> the surface (low -> wet, high -> dry).
> 
> And I would like to thank Norbert Kern for giving a pointer in the right
> direction with the link to the article in his post, and his incredible and
> inspiring images. And of course all other here in the forums, I hope I can
> become just half as good as some of you guys =)..
> 
> All c&c is welcome, and tips on improving the image, hope you like it...
> 
> /Jani
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
      I've been working on a large project for some time that I need 
vegetation for, Trees, shrubs, that sort of thing.  The problem I'm 
having is that I need at least five fair-sized trees around a central 
structure, but I'm having problems creating a tree large enough that 
doesn't interfere with the surroundings.

      I was thinking that an elegant solution might be to create a 
generator macro that would do collision detection and deflection 
calculations given a starting point, tree type or set of parameters, and 
age.  I am, however, nowhere near skilled enough to manage such a thing 
at this time.

      Would it be possible to write a macro that could do this? 
Otherwise, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,

ADB

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