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.