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01/25/04

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What is an L-System ?

Lindenmayer system, or L-System, was introduced in 1968 by the biologist Aristid Lindenmayer, primarily conceived as a mathematical theory on plant development. In the 'bible' of L-Systems, "`The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" (ISBN 0-387-97297-8) - or ABOP for short-, Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz wrote: 

"The central concept of L-systems is that of rewriting. In general, rewriting is a technique for defining complex objects by successively replacing parts of a simple initial object using a set of rewriting rules or production.'' 

An l-system is a rule like description of a 3d form. It contains descriptions of parts and how they should be assembeld together. The program reads a l-system description in and processes it into a 3d form which can then be outputed into DXF format. 

The description is applied to itself a number of times (e.g., recursion levels) so fractal and recursive forms are very easy to describe in an l-system. That's why they are used a lot for plants and natural looking organic forms. By increasing the recursion level the form slowly 'grows' and becomes more complex. 

 

Program Functions

Program Functions are available via the menu system and speed buttons.


L-System 4 utilizes MDI (Multi Document Interface) programming architecture to let the user open several windows while working on LS file development.  Additional features include random seed file generation and an admittedly lame mutator.

Graphic Viewer

L-System Version 4 includes an integrated viewer which allows the user to rotate and move the object generated by the seed file.  From this screen the user can save the output either as an image (bmp or jpg) or can export the object as a dxf file.

Hints:

The ESC key will close the viewer window and return to the editor.  This is extremely useful when running the random seed file generator, it will allow you to quickly (without a lot of keystrokes) cycle through many random generations.  Try it!

Holding down the CTRL key which clicking on the rotation keys forces a 45 degree rotation.

You can click on each of the Layer Textures to select other Textures.

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This site was last updated 01/25/04