Slashdot Mirror
Computer Scientists Grow a Better Virtual Tree
Reservoir Hill points us to a story about a group of computer scientists who are taking steps to bring the creation of 3-D worlds to the casual user. As a proof-of-concept, Vladlen Koltun and the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, using data collected by botanists, have developed software to create virtual 3-D trees with roughly 100 different tree attributes, all of which are highly variable. Quoting:
"The inability of casual computer users to build 3-D objects - you practically have to be a sculptor, Koltun says - is an anchor holding back the promise of virtual worlds. Koltun's software, Dryad (a tree nymph in Greek mythology,) lets users move through the 100-attribute tree space in a fashion similar to navigating city streets on Google Maps. As in real life, not all trees are equally desirable. Since no single user is capable of mapping out the best parts of the enormous tree space, this mapping of desirability is done collaboratively, leading to continuous refinement of the software."
It's nice to see our carbon offsets hard at work...
Is it me or does building a better tree *nymph* seem like a more worthwhile project?
The Virtual Greenpeace will be pleased
This will probably annoy SpeedTree as I`m sure someone may optimiser the rendering of the trees at some point..
Oh well - looks like fun, though.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It uses a tree search algorithm to find it's data files?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
In Soviet Russia Virtual Tree grow better Computer Scientists.
Generating visually complex plant like shapes has been a mainstay of 3D modeling software and demos for a while now. These guys might have worked with botanists and expressed hundreds of attributes, but I don't see how this will translate to better tools for 3D modeling in general.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
http://ngplant.sourceforge.net/
Plant generators have existed for a while. There was a proprietary one (that I forget the name of now) that was very good, and there's the above open source one as well. (Which I haven't actually used.)
As for making it easier for users to create virtual worlds... This is just one small aspect of a world, and doesn't even fully support that, from what I can see.
"Dryad trees are truly 3-D; they can be spun around or viewed from any angle. They also can be downloaded in the OBJ format and loaded into any major modeling program."
So it only creates a static OBJ. There's no animation, no information on how it flexes... You can't make this tree sway in the wind without the same tedious work that's always been necessary.
Saying this helps create virtual worlds is like a crayon manufacturer saying it helps create art... Sure, as long as you only want non-professional art. (And yes, just like crayons, you -can- make professional art with this if you have a ton of talent and are willing to put in the time.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
This reminds me when a virtual tree was used to show off the GeForce cards.
..till computer scientists forget trees and grow better Bush.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It's not quite Speedtree yet, but given time it could be. I can't help but imagine it's going to have a less expensive license. heh.
Similar stuff:
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/dla3d/
Infinity does not mean > FLT_MAX. There are a finite number of trees a system with finite resources can generate. If you want an infinite number of possible trees then create an implementation for a universal Turing machine.
As noted aobove, tools for creating trees are pretty common, ie Blender now has a fairly powerful treemaker that is being used for the Peach Open Movie,
http://peach.blender.org/index.php/trees/
The author does mention that Dryad is 'easy to use', but there are a fair number of easy to use tree making tools already so not sure how 'revolutionary' it is.
LetterRip
it might be a better tree from a botanical point of view sure,
but are any users from these games going to look at them and notice? hell, I bet they don't even look at the trees in the first place. my ten cents tells me that this software is only going to be valuable if you can store a complete tree in those few hundred botanical variables and then recreate it on demand in SW, this compressing the amount of data needed for the game storage.
bottom line: its not an improvement if nobody except a botanist can tell the difference - there have been less perfect trees readily available for quite some time now.
Slartibartfast - The virtual fjord designer.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
a poem as lovely as a parameterized tree....
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Sketchup (now Google Sketchup) is actually a very intuitive 3d modeling tool--probably the most intuitive by far, IMHO, but it actually suffers from a lack of depth. I'm waiting for Google to work their magic on it...still waiting, actually.
expandfairuse.org
All the trees in the gallery look strangely similar. Are they all conifers so far? It's still downloading the trees from their server (and no doubt slashdotted), but I was hoping to use it to build deciduous-type trees (virtual bonsai). Oh, well. It's still cool.
Thanks, guys. As Ms. Fawcett would say, "I'm into trees." (Just not quite in the same way she is...)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
that this website gets promoted heavily and posted to Slashdot just as the submission deadline for the annual SIGGRAPH conference is approaching.
No WAY this could have anything to do with promoting the visibility of a project that might be described further in a paper that gets submitted there.
Just my 0.2E-32
A.
3d object creation is simple and free... Wings3d, Bryce, Truespace 3, Gmax... as far as trees goes, ever hear of xfrog? It's been around many years.
The point of this is you no longer have to be a 3D wiz or artist to make decent 3D objects - you just plug in their attributes and they generate themselves.
So say you are a great programmer but a totally lousy artist - now you can actually make that cool 3D game you have been envisioning by yourself.
Vue 6 does an amazing job of creating random trees. The only downside is they aren't really suitable for gaming. You can export most of them and I use them in other 3D apps but they tend to be pretty poly intensive and even slow down the renders in 3D apps. You've got some resolution control but even at the lowest levels they are a bit heavy for creating a forest for games. Still an excellent app for plants. I use it all the time for plates and backdrops. It works well for skyboxes and even a forested, or mountainous, edge of a skybox, I've done that many times.
Did they use Bryce as a base for the improvements? It would be cool if the collaboration could link back into a 3D suite.
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
I have time to reply to this because I'm running an 8 minute build for the 5th time since lunch (which is not as bad as it can be actually). I can tell you that I'm not particularly amused at the moment.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
By Aristid Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. Absolutley stunning book. Several (many) of the renderings (the palms in particular) are verging on realistic. It's out of print now and you definitely can't have my copy. I won't give it up!
It turns out it's available here http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop on the interweb for free.
Sadly Lindenmayer died the year before the book was published and the book itself is dedicated to him. It's one of those rare science books that makes a good coffee table book too.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
From TFA: "virtual-world enthusiasts can create the trees of their dreams"
How many of us honestly dream about trees? Really?
-1 not first post
Has anyone here downloaded Dryad (the software) and got it to work?
I tried it a few weeks ago when I first heard of (believe it was 1.0 not the January 1.1 release). On two beefy computers the program would start then proceeded to crash after 20 seconds of interacting with it. I never saw a tree. I wasn't worried about specs as the one computer has 3 gigs of RAM and an 8800.
I'm all for releasing public alphas or betas, but was surprised at how brittle it seemed considering the lack of warning or documentation.
What do you mean "joe" can't create custom trees?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
From the title, I was expecting some kind of either general, or special case improvement on search tree "geometry." Which I think we can agree would have been far more exciting than the, still interesting, CG improvement.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Actually actually actually actually.
"...the three-dimensional environment of virtual worlds will finally live up to its promise as an ideal setting for...flirting with alien creatures." I get the feeling he's never played Second Life.
Oh dear, my pet peeve again, self-annointed Computer Experts propounding about Turing's theories, while displaying an utter lack of comprehension of what Turing actually said.
Computers are finite state machines. We cannot create a computer with an infinite amount of memory, and there are only a finite number of steps a program can run unless we're prepared to let the program run forever. Therefore there are a finite number of final states that any program can arrive at. Ergo, there are only a finite number of "tree programs' that can be created, and the hardware and software limits create a substantial limit on the number of possible trees a computer can generate.
If you don't believe me, go read Turing's papers on morphogenesis and phyllotaxis. He specifically addressed the issue of tree growth. We may think of Earth as having unlimited resources, but it really is finite. There are limits on the possible trees that nature generates, analogous to what I have argued above.
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dryad...does it get 'excited' when you feed it chocolate?
SpeedTree already does this, and does a very nice job. Try their free downloads. SpeedTree has smooth level of detail processing, so you can draw very large forests in real time. One of their demos is a "million tree forest". Every tree is different; they're generated procedurally from a set of parameters. You can use their tree library, with about 1000 different varieties of tree, or design your own trees.
The upcoming game "Spore" is supposed to have some fairly impressive organic modeling tools that are extremely simple to use. Some of the early demo videos of the modeler in action certainly suggest the learning curve involved will be fairly small versus the type of content one could generate with it.
8==8 Bones 8==8
It sounds like they are talking about a sort of programming language with thousands of primitives, many of which have hundreds of options; I wish them good luck in organizing that in a managable way, and I see no chance that they will beat Wolfram Research to it.
When they get it to the point that you can put in "Quercus abba" or "Quercus stellata" and get a realistic virtual tree representing the species you entered they will have a very good teaching tool.
On top of that if the parameters (assuming a species to parameter set mapping) just happen to match some minimally spanning set of parameters found by data mining a database of trees I think they would have something.
Virtual worlds aren't just for gamers and the socially virtual. Just as we want online books that can be "reprinted" and not lugged around. Virtual teaching ecologies could make biolabs a lot less expensive.
I quickly looked through their site and didn't see any documentation about what sort of model they used. A lot of the trees look oddly familiar, so I'm wondering what sort of "better" they might have to offer.
I can't run it given the limited portability. Does anyone have the list of what "100 attributes" they are using? Is this an artistic attribute model, an L-system, or something else?
I see executables in zips, but no source.
implementation of biomorphs http://www.rennard.org/alife/english/biomgb.html
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
None of these fawning posts, especially the one that claims "FREE DOWNLOAD!" mentions that the licensing fees for SpeedTree are ridiculous. For this reason open source or small game companies wouldn't touch their products with a bargepole. Dryad is free even for commercial use.
The only CG plant here is astroturf by Speedtree.
"Oh dear, my pet peeve again, self-annointed Computer Experts propounding about Turing's theories, while displaying an utter lack of comprehension of what Turing actually said."
It is called "Universal" because it can compute anything that is computable not because it can list everything that is computable.
"there are only a finite number of steps a program can run unless we're prepared to let the program run forever"
You also seem to have missed the point of Turing's halting problem.
"analogous to what I have argued above"
That wasn't an argument, it was a pedantic troll that mis-represents both Turing's work and computer science in general.
BTW: Who "annoited" you?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Check out the free PlantStudio software:
:-) [I'm one of the developers.]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/index.htm
Originally for Windows, but runs under WINE.
"PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. The PlantStudio software simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can "grow" plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes."
It's about ten years old, but still useful.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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