PlantEdit

Abstract

PlantEdit is an application for creating three dimensional, L-system based plant models.

It's main goal are usability, a powerful domain centric model, and support for generating plants for games and virtual interactive environments, as well as output of 3D models for static rendered scenes. It is written in Java, which means it is portable to most platforms. It will export plants in a custom (probably xml based) format, that can include various default and user specified metadata about plants (useful for integrating plant models with ecology / ecotope based landscape generation). It will also be possible to export plants in some of the more common 3D file formats, and as rendered pictures from the built in OpenGL based polygonal renderer. Batch jobs for easily saving pictures a number of plants from many directions and similar tasks are also planned.

PlantEdit's main inspiration are a number of articles about modelling L-system based plants written by Bernd Lintermann and Oliver Deussen. They have also created a commercial application for plant modelling (see the reference material section for links).

News

Date	Updater
2002-03-12	zzorn	Work is progressing slowly but somewhat steadily. I'm currently working on the structure view, and just added initial JUnit based unit testing classes. Added screenshot.
2002-02-01	zzorn	Uploaded files to CVS and cretaed initial homepage.

Screenshots

2002-03-12. Initial work on the structure panel.

An early version of PlantEdit. Only the node library has an initial implementation.
It already supports unlimited undo and redo of the test command, though.

Battleplan

The initial battleplan.

Team

Nickname	Name	Position
zzorn	Hans Häggström	Project founder and coordinator.

Coding

The code can be found in worldforge CVS in forge/tools/plantedit/

More developers are welcome, contact zzorn if you are interested.
Small bugfixes can be done directly if you have already been working on PlantEdit, but please consult zzorn before undertaking any larger changes or additions.
The coding style is similar as in existing files; four space indent and opening braces on new line. Basically similar to the Sun Java coding and naming style.
All classes and methods should be commented. Comments for paragrahs of code in methods is nice too.

Design Document

Document describing the general architecture of the program, and design patterns used for different parts.
This documentation will be written later, when the code is more stabile.

User Documentation

This will be written when the program starts to be usable. Volunteers welcome! ;-)

Reference Material

Some related references outside WorldForge:

Interactive Structural and Geometrical Modeling of Plants: An article summarizing the interactive L-system based plant modeling technique clearly. (Lintermann, B., Deussen, O. IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, vol 19(1), jan/feb 1999).
A Modelling Method and User Interface for Creating Plants (1997): The original paper. (Lintermann, B., Deussen, O. Computer Graphics Forum, vol 17, number 1, march 1998)
XFrog home: A commercial application based on and described in the above papers.
The Virtual Terrain project's page about plants: A good overview of the most important applications and papers on the subject of plant modeling and rendering.