Procedural tree/vegetation generator

Hi there,

I started working on a procedural tree/vegetation generator yesterday. It generates a vast variety of trees/plants/shrubs dynamically and most results are quite convincing. Of course it still requires a lot of tweaking.

Here is a demo of my progress so far. Still no mesh and no lighting, but you can have fun with it I guess! Hit "n" to generate a new tree.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9289442/WebPlayer.html

Update: The project is coming along well! Here is a video showing different variations of an African acacia tree:
[video=facebook;10151156377155753]http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10151156377155753&saved

 

Cooohol

I think it won't be for free ( silly me ) ?

Keep it up, it's nice.

 

Cool, looking forward to seeing an update on this one . )

 

Great work.

You can generate some very convincing trees with this. Procedural is the future.

It would be cool to see this on a landscape even without bark or leaves.

 

are these l systems?

i lub this stuff.

 

Thanks! At the moment, the trees are generated using billboards facing the camera, so I'm not sure it would look good on a landscape but I could try.

Nope! l-systems are very complex to manage in order to give good and realistic results. I use the space colonization algorithm, which is extremely simple and versatile.

 

Very cool, and close to some code I'm looking for. I'm a teacher who got roped in to doing a generative modeling project (visualizing cellular regeneration inside the eye of a Zebrafish). Its seems fun, but my students have 0 scripting skills and my own are kinda subpar...

Hope you can post (share or sell?) the code in the next few weeks.

 

Sure, if I'm able to properly convert the generated trees to a mesh, I'll be selling the package with a full api and a tree editor. If I don't have the time to do this, I could potentially release what I accomplished for free. Thanks for the comment!

 

Have you explored plant succession? Because this addition would create a dynamic placement of flora while using natural systems to bring about forests (the end game). It would be rad if a developer could be painting and the longer they painted an area the farther along in succession an area would be "painted" or by erasing it would turn back time on the succession of an area.

 

This would actually be quite simple to implement, I think. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into that.

 

I like my tree.

 

Hahaha, I know it isn't perfect. This is not so hard to fix but I'm currently focusing on rendering methods.

 

O-o am I the only one that had a fair amount of enjoyment out of building a tree, flinging it into a spin, then building another and doing the same?

 

Ive been searching for a few weeks with no luck. How does one procedurally make a tree? i know thats a broad question, but even knowing how to access the tree.data variables would help so much. PLEASE

i have been scripting a few years and am quite familiar with unity

 

Wow nice

 

Keep The Project Up (That is good work dude)

 

I will not provide the exact code, but the technique I used is described here: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/colonization.egwnp2007.large.pdf.

It is easy to read and understand. My advice: Take the time to draw on a whiteboard or with pen and paper! It helps a lot to understand the algorithm. Good luck!

By the way, I'm still working actively on the project. I just found a solution to polygonize the branches, so a new webplayer will be available soon.

 

Brilliant... very nice trees, you could keep it just as it is , just add different modes on top if this one it's great. i would have sworn that it was 3d, because it looks like stacks of cylidners for the trunks.

I made some abit like this using cubes instead of cylinders... Then i want to map the mesh of the cubes on on top of each other and give them a vaguely incremental UV.

there is a briefer explanation in middle of this page:
http://procworld.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/space-colonization.html

 

Unity's Tree is fine for pregenerated trees. I decided to write everything from scratch to be able to generate and modify trees in runtime in background threads.

 

Very cool. I wish I had this kind of script to generate optimized geometry. Is your script (or method) available anywhere?

 

Very cool procedural tree you have there.

 

Update!

Here is a short video showing different variations of an African acacia tree:
[video=facebook;10151156377155753]http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10151156377155753&saved

 

This looks extremely promising!
Do you have any plans on releasing it any time soon? How much is it going to cost?

 

SuperB_!!:!!

 

I want to release it as soon as possible, but there is still work to do. Here is my to-do list:

• Space partitioning optimization using RTrees
• Correct some UV bugs
• Add a ton of presets
• Make a user-friendly tree editor
• Create various methods to create entire forests easily from a splatmap or for a specific region

For the price, I really have no idea. Thanks for the comments!

 

Looks amazing.

 

Afternoon all,

I had been watching this thread with interest for a while as we planned to do a game which used procedural trees.

Anyway we've been working on this for a couple of months, there is still a long way to go but we're quite please with the way it is going.

Some Procedural Tree Growth

[video=youtube_share;Qk4iNJTBCgM]http://youtu.be/Qk4iNJTBCgM

And some manipulation of the Tree

[video=youtube_share;PYp0ZovXCPo]http://youtu.be/PYp0ZovXCPo

 

There is some really cool stuff in this thread. Any update on this project? I've begun working on an implementation of the space colonization algorithm, but if your project is available on the asset store I would definitely buy it, as it is very similar to what I am trying to do.