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:

olive_bush

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.