PyPlants has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few days (well, evenings), and now from its new home as PyPlants on bitbucket sports a completely rewritten rendering backend which is more modular, should be really easy to plug into, and now supports POV-Ray out of the box.
What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer? Yes indeed, as promised in the second part of this series of development diaries, I’ve now finished work on an update that turns this:
("A", "I+[A+O]-->>[--L]I[++L]-[AO]++AO")
("I", "FS[>>&&L][>>^^L]FS")
("S", "SFS")
("L", "['{+f-ff-f+|+f-ff-f}]")
("O", "[&&&C`>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W]")
("C", "FF")
("W", "[`^F][{&&&&-f+f|-f+f}]")
Into this:
Rendering of an olive bush from pyplants povray renderer
Unfortunately it’s now 2am, so the write-up will have to wait for the weekend. Do feel free to grab the code and have a poke around. You’ll obviously need povray, pygame, and pycairo installed, but everything else should work with python’s included batteries.
In the previous part of this article we looked at the background to L-Systems, and how they could be used for describing self-similar biological systems. In this part we’ll look at a sample implementation of a very basic 2D L-System in Python, together with a basic PNG renderer using PyCairo.
This is an implementation of a …
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For a fledgling project idea, I’ve recently needed to work out how to draw plants procedurally, and of course Python is my language of choice for some rapid prototyping. Whilst some richly-featured professional applications exist for generating flora in a procedural fashion for high-end rendering, there are precious few systems available for the kind of …
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Ten things I’ve learned as a developer at WooMe:
Be clear what your direction is. Identify your key proposition and focus on it. Don’t get distracted by unrelated features — somebody else is probably already doing those better than you.
Be merciless with features that don’t cut it. No matter how much you like it, if your audience doesn’t …
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