Wednesday, January 9, 2013

L-systems

Before I can venture further with RBDs and fractureing I needed to create my flower seeds, leaves, and stem.

if you are unfamiliar with L-systems they are equal parts awesome and frustrating. Awesome in that you can create a blue print to grow CG plants,  geometric shapes, ect... however they are limited in that the L-system turtle commands can only take a limited number of variables, and they can quickly eat up large amounts of computing power, as L-systems maintain alot of history/data as they are grown/created.

for this project i needed three main components. first i needed a seed arrangement's for my flowering hands. Plant adhere to several laws for governing petal and seed arrangements and growth that fall under the heading of phyllotaxis .

for a description of phyllotaxis  check out the L-system help documents from sidefx. and this website:

http://www.selcukergen.net/ncca_lsystems_research/houdini.html

LEAVES:
here I created an L-system for the half of a leave. grouped it and then mirrored the geometry using the below values:

VALUES:



RULES:



STEM:
for this i needed a long stem similar to that of a rose stem with branching leave stems and thorns:


VALUES:




RULES:



after I have these rules set up i can then supply the leaves to the J and K leaf input nodes of the stem L-system and the result:



Next i needed to create a phyllotaxis rig that i could animate parameters to make the spiral structure rotate:

VALUES:



RULES:


with this in place i can now attach my arms to the appropriate leave input of the L-system with a transform node to align the orientation of that arm animation as needed the result:







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