Digging Into PlantStudio, a Bit Late
December 1, 2024 9:29 AM Subscribe
The calm, serene life associated with gardening pairs suspiciously well with rose-tinted wistfulness for a simpler time in computing. I’m happy to be wrong though, because software doesn’t get more real than PlantStudio. Written by Kurtz-Fernhout Software, PlantStudio is a surprisingly deep botany simulator for creating and arranging 3D models of herbaceous plants based on how real plants grow, change, fruit, and flower, over their life cycles. The last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, but a little bit of work gets it running on macOS.
Oh my gosh I did a much worse version of this as a hobby project once. Just the Lindenmayer-ish plant form generation, and they do so much more and so neatly.
*Later* I considered a formal research project that would have appended to one of the other massive, generations old, FORTRAN codes managed by a government office for serious purposes. The most optimistic estimate for finding the (equivalent of) the right API to start on was six months. Making one into a PC program in that era!!
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Also impressed that they’re still interested in re-releasing it after paying so much the first time.
posted by clew at 11:23 AM on December 1
*Later* I considered a formal research project that would have appended to one of the other massive, generations old, FORTRAN codes managed by a government office for serious purposes. The most optimistic estimate for finding the (equivalent of) the right API to start on was six months. Making one into a PC program in that era!!
—-
Also impressed that they’re still interested in re-releasing it after paying so much the first time.
posted by clew at 11:23 AM on December 1
22 years later, a product called SpeedTree is used by game and movie studios to create absolutely stunning photorealistic plant models in much the same way. (You can download the editor software for free to just mess with it.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:43 PM on December 1
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:43 PM on December 1
Oh my gosh I did a much worse version of this as a hobby project once.
Ha ha! I posted this because I was the same. For years I've been meaning to read through The Algorithmic Botony of Plants, a free textbook on Lindenmayer systems.
Link to SpeedTree that seanmpuckett mentioned.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:25 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]
Ha ha! I posted this because I was the same. For years I've been meaning to read through The Algorithmic Botony of Plants, a free textbook on Lindenmayer systems.
Link to SpeedTree that seanmpuckett mentioned.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:25 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]
GOOD STUFF in the papers list at Algorithmic Botany! “Choosing the right abstraction”, for sooth.
I thought I still had a print copy of The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants but where I thought it was I find The Computational Beauty of Nature instead. And Cylindrical Cow, good argumentative neighbors.
posted by clew at 4:32 PM on December 1
I thought I still had a print copy of The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants but where I thought it was I find The Computational Beauty of Nature instead. And Cylindrical Cow, good argumentative neighbors.
posted by clew at 4:32 PM on December 1
more self indulgent nostalgia: fiddling around with this, with a math degree but no actual computer training, I amused a whole floor of hotshot programmers with my outraged shout of “Pseudorandomness is completely deterministic, the hell?!?”. Led to good hallway craic on both whether computed randomness is possible and how to set expectations of libraries.
posted by clew at 4:36 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 4:36 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]
The code is available on Github with some aborted attempts to modernize and port it to other languages. That could be a really fun project for someone to pick up.
posted by whatnotever at 4:57 PM on December 1 [2 favorites]
posted by whatnotever at 4:57 PM on December 1 [2 favorites]
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