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Simulated Growing Plants
- rolph 4y agosight unseen this memory was triggered: http://www.weedfarmer.com/seeds/ http://www.weedfarmer.com/seeds/ keep in mind there is a hotlink to an EXE on this page. i had this bit of freeware from a long time ago the original ware is from slick software and there a lot of imitations. there used to be a lot of digital seed trading going on between players when the simulated grow produces hybrid seeds.
- oogetyboogety 4y agoBest example of domain driven design
- crubier 4y agoOh hey, YCS18 batch mates! Nice to see you there! This looks awesome, could be super helpful for synthetic data generation, for a lot of industries including mine (drones). The UE compatibility is a very good selling point, and the procedural nature is also a good selling point (less overfitting of neural nets trained on a limited set of tree models)
- Valgrim 4y agoAs far as I'm concerned, I would absolutely love an immersive game where I can just walk around, plant trees, and see them grow.
- hollydale 4y agoHi! Nice to see you on here! Yes that is an interesting application for synthetic data generation that we plan to look into - I will contact you when we head down that path!
- crubier 4y agoFWIW, Many people use UE for synthetic data generation, so a plugin that generates trees to add in UE scenes is already super useful for that use case.
- rl3 4y ago>Oh hey, YCS18 ... Thanks for this! For the last couple years I've occasionally wondered "What was that tree rendering startup in YC a few years back?" and could never find it. Was starting to think I'd imagined it.
- antegamisou 4y agoFor anyone interested to look more in-depth on the subject, there's an entire book dedicated to it called Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. The math is really cool! http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop
- amelius 4y agoI wonder, though, if these techniques are about to be replaced by something like Stable Diffusion (a 3d version of it).
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoSure, but L-systems are neato for how simple they are.
- tarakat 4y agoML systems are more difficult to tweak. E.g. if you want to adjust parameters such as growth speed, branching factor, sunlight attraction, etc., and see how the resulting plant changes.
- AtomicOrbital 4y agoSure some NN tool can ape anything however that approach sheds zero intuition on understanding the hidden structure of what it's mimicking... current wave of NN masks asking the important questions like how does a cell grow ... I fear NN mania kicks the can down the road without revealing anything fundamental to understanding
- frozenport 4y agoIn general we know how cells grow, and even plants. Actual plants are controlled by variables that vary species to species, can't be easily measured, and are too numerous to count.
- slavik81 4y ago
- hosh 4y agoI'd love to see this as part of a permaculture planning tool. Though it would probably require a lot more different kinds of growth parameters. Figs and bayans, for example, won't grow like the typical hardwood deciduous tree ... while most trees grows with some kind of symmetry between upper limbs and the root system, fig trees don't follow that.
- hollydale 4y agoThe potential applications to permaculture planning are quite exciting. We can leverage the basic aspects of our current plant models and create new models for different species that capture not only their appearance but their behavior to different environmental factors.
- ephbit 4y ago> ... while most trees grows with some kind of symmetry between upper limbs and the root system, fig trees don't follow that. Just curious, how then do fig trees differ from this symmetry of growth roughly?
- hosh 4y agoThe upper limbs of a fig tree seem to grow whichever way to reach the light, and the root system will also grow like that. A fig tree might be trimmed and still have an extensive root system. Hardwoods will try to maintain some kind of symmetry. One root that branches supports a branch above ground. If that root is cut, the above-soil branch it supports dies out. Likewise, cut the branch, and if it does not grow back, the root will die back. This is why for hardwoods and most trees, when you transplant them bareroot, it’s best to spread the roots out.
- ephbit 4y ago> One root that branches supports a branch above ground. If that root is cut, the above-soil branch it supports dies out. Do I get this right? You're implying that specific roots are somehow more or less associated with specific branches in most hardwood species but this association is less strong in fig trees? And the association comes from capillaries running all the way from the roots to the twigs with basically no interconnections in between (that'd be in the stem)?
- mcphage 4y agoThese look great! Do you simulate effects like crown shyness?
- hollydale 4y agoYes! Here is an example showing how the crowns fit together https://youtube.com/shorts/mdhm2KvSkw4?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/mdhm2KvSkw4?feature=share
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- mcphage 4y agoAwesome, thanks! Sorry to pepper you with questions, but what about major branches breaking occasionally?
- hollydale 4y agoWe do simulate branch shedding for branches that are not doing too well. Branches can also be human pruned. Branches breaking due to weather or strain over time is an interesting addition to look into!
- MrLeap 4y agoNeat tech coming out of the UE world. I made something similar for the weird Lovecraftian text editor I'm making. My goal's to eventually let people fill a wasteland with flora by doing creative writing around it. Mine's more stylized, simpler, and Unity. :p https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1515840289096753162 https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1515840289096753162
- spoonjim 4y agoThis is really cool. I would love a VR meditation-style app where you just planted trees and watched them grow. Perhaps set at the foot of Mount Fuji with some daily haikus or something.
- gorgoiler 4y agoThe visuals are beautiful but, ahem, I can’t help falling in love with this presumably royalty-free stock music which accompanies them. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vGJTaP6anOU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vGJTaP6anOU
- Animats 4y agoOh, like Speedtree Live.[1] Speedtree has been around since 2000, and it's pretty good. I used to keep the Speedtree Million Tree Forest demo executable around to run for relaxation. Epic has been developing in-house replacements for middleware used with Unreal Engine. Metahuman replaces other character builders. UE has replaced Simplygon with a new level of detail generator. The PhysX physics engine was replaced with UE's own Chaos Physics. Now it looks like Speedtree is getting replaced. Probably because the IDV, the company behind Speedtree, was acquired by Unity in 2021. Simplygon was acquired by Microsoft. PhysX was acquired by NVidia. Epic supports UE5 on a wide array of competing platforms, and they don't want to be dependent on middleware that's owned by a platform or a competitor. It's bad for their business model. Unreal Engine has an unusual business model. It's free to use until you get a million dollars in revenue. Then they charge a percentage of revenue. This reflects the economics of the game industry. Most of the profits come from the top 10 or 20 games. So the number of customers they actually have to bill is quite small. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0DwVQA-4Ns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0DwVQA-4Ns