Gena wrote:
> Willem de Wilde <wil### [at] nomailcom> wrote:
> 
>>Would that Plant system also include
>>- animation i.e. grow plant on arbitrary object
>>- react on external parameters i.e. sunlight, wind, gravity
> 
> 
> Why not. Unfortunately I don't see too much interest
> in such project. It's difficult to do the project of
> such scope alone.

I somehow forgot to post a reply to this although i really intended to. 
  I did various attempts for plant generation systems myself in the past 
and based on that a few notes:

- the most difficult thing is to find a compromise between universality 
and quality of the results.  A plant system that can generate any kind 
of plants will be extremely difficult to design for good results in all 
situations.  Example:  joints between branches in a tree.  This is a 
weak spot of a lot of growth systems (also xfrog for example).  It is 
quite possible to create a system generating good looking joints for any 
configuration of a single branching (where one branch splits into two). 
  In an universal system this however will not be sufficient - you will 
have to be able to generate joints with a larger number of branches as well.

- script based plant systems are quite straight away and nice to use, 
you can implement interaction of the growth with the environment quite 
easily as well.  But they have one extremely weak point:  They are slow. 
  A plant is often a very complex object and a script based plant 
generator is slow in two ways:  First of all the generation algorithm is 
implemented in slow interpreted code and second the generated plant has 
to be parsed in text form after that which takes time as well.  I tried 
it and a plant generator integrated into POV-Ray can be faster than 
parsing the plant mesh alone.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.imagico.de/ (Last updated 31 Oct. 2005)
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