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Related Works

L-systems are very suitable for computer implementation, and several systems appeared since the publication of Prusinkiewicz's milestone book in this area [&make_named_href('', "node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. These systems create beautiful L-system-based plant pictures, and most of the systems are quite large.

On Unix, CPFG 2.7 was developed by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and his students at the Universities of Regina and Calgary. It is an enhanced version of the L-system language described in the book The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants [&make_named_href('', "node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. This is very large software to facilitate model experimentations on complicated L-systems. Specific species of plants are modeled in this system. This is the only system that can produce three-dimensional animations, but from very complicated L-system definitions.

LSYS was written by Jon Leech in C++ from the description of L-systems in the same book[&make_named_href('', "node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. It uses data files to describe the L-systems, and program execution is controlled by a command line. Static image output is generated in PostScript files.

LParser was written on the PC by Laurens J. Lapre[&make_named_href('', "node22.html#Lapr96","[Lapr96]")]. It has its own viewer which uses wire-frame rendering to depict L-system structures. It allows mutations in generation and has some preliminary animation support. It can also output in several different formats for various ray tracers and renderers.

Since the emergence and popularity of the new computer language Java, much software has been re-implemented in this language. Java is almost an ideal language to implement and render L-system plant growing, because of its capability of dealing with graphics and animation, and of course with its famous feature of elegant object-oriented style and its machine independence.

Few L-systems are implemented in Java at present. The only work that can be found is a two dimensional rendering of the basic L-system in Java by Mark Mass in 1996 [&make_named_href('', "node22.html#Mass96","[Mass96]")]. This work represents the branches of the plant as plain, straight lines on the screen.


next up previous contents
Next: Goal Up: Introduction Previous: Turtle Interpretation

Tong Lin (tlin2@cs.umbc.edu)