The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants

This one is for Video Game Foliage, who encouraged me to start this blog in the first place.

We’ve talked about L-Systems before: grammars of rules that can be used to, among other things, describe plants. In The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer describe computer modeling of plants, with detailed looks at simulating different parts of plants. Lindenmayer systems feature heavily, of course.

The book is available online. Though it was originally written in 1990 and there are new techniques that have been developed since, it’s still a really good introductory text to the botany and simulation you’ll want to think about when making digital plants.