Preliminary Course.
Plant and crop Models
Structural Models (1)
Structural Plant Models also called Geometrical Plant Models are designed to simulate the structure of plants. They have to cope with two major difficulties: firstly the potential complexity in single plants related to the structural complexity resulting from branching; secondly, the complexity related to the variability found in plants.
Since the early ages of computer sciences, this challenging topic has led to many developments.
To overcome both complexities, computer generated plants may use procedural approaches (automata, particle systems, fractals, combinatorics,etc.) and/or rule based approaches (grammars). In both cases, computational plant structures are generated with a constructive process related, or usually not, to real plant growth.
Note that numerous computational plant approaches avoid structure computation, using for instance images or so called impostors; they therefore do not deliver 3D structures as output, but simple images or textures.
An interesting review of all these approaches can be found in the book Digital Design of Nature (Deussen and Lintermann 2005).
AMAP approach
The AMAP computational approach is the first procedural construction inspired from botany.
It applies mortality, dormancy and branching on the terminal bud of the basic botanical element, the internode.
The structure is then built using an algorithm following the bud development cycles:
-
begin
for each growth cycle do
test bud viability
test bud dormancy
if the bud is alive and not resting then
build an internode
store the new axillary buds (if any)
if the internode is the first of a new branch then
compute the internode orientation
end
compute the internode length and the new bud position
end
end
end
Bibliography
Oliver Deussen, Bernd Lintermann 2005. Digital Design of Nature: Computer Generated Plants and Organics. Editor: Springer may 2005. 307 p. ISBN:978-3540405917
Definition