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? …
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 …
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 …
Every now and then someone at TED presents a technology or an idea that’s so utterly amazing, or ridiculously simple that it can’t help but change the world. David Merrill shows off an MIT project called Siftables in this talk, and even though I’ve been messing around with computing for 25 years my jaw is …
Beautiful Soup is a great little Python module that will read just about any HTML page and give you back a structured parsed tree. It’s awesome because you can pass it just about any mangled markup — I’ve never known it to choke on anything. For some web service consumers I’ve had to write over …