Early in my university days, I was studying for a test in the science and engineering library. Restless, I wandered around and pulled some books at random looking for a distraction.
I found this book, and poof! My study time vanished. I started learning OpenGL just so I could try some of these things. At the time, I thought "algorithms" were something I'd always be bad at, but playing with the ideas in this book helped blunt that fear a bit. After all, I was just having fun.
The growth of the plant follows Space Colonization Algorithm which have been used for rending realistic trees in games. This algorithm is based on a cloud of points which have been inspired by the grown of tree in order to provide a certain attraction to the growing branches.
I find fruit trees to be especially beautiful plants. Part of me thinks its because they've been bred by humans for beauty for centuries. Large color full fruit, interesting bark, beautiful spring flowers, ... The other part, thinks its my 50 million year old monkey brain aesthetic. Some primitive distant memory of swinging from branch to branch to get at the tasty fruit in the distant tree. And positive association with that tree.
My wife bought me the physical copy of this book because I love it so much.
If anyone wants an easy way to play with lsystems the way I did it was to download the non commercial version of Touchdesigner... Drop down an lsystem SOP node and then just play around with the parameters.
Note that though some features of plant morphology lend themselves beautifully to algorithmic approximation others are more difficult to study and remain poorly understood: e.g., root system architecture
I found this book, and poof! My study time vanished. I started learning OpenGL just so I could try some of these things. At the time, I thought "algorithms" were something I'd always be bad at, but playing with the ideas in this book helped blunt that fear a bit. After all, I was just having fun.