LA-1: LSystems

Christopher O’Neill

With this project I picked several of my favorite plants that I work with daily. I wanted to capture the plants physical features and represent them on a coaster set that was laser etched. My main issues where figuring out what parts of the code whether it be the branching rules or even as simple as changing the angles or length of the lines and manipulating them to do what I wanted. Playing with the settings and rules it finally started making more sense as to what was going on and in the end I ended up with a great set of coasters of some of my favorite plants.

The Rosemary bush is a great addition to the garden and food. This one took some time to figure out how to manipulate the program to make a more V shaped body of the plant.

String axiom = "[-X][+X][-FX][+FX][FX]";
String [][] rules = { {"F", "FF", "F", "FF"},
{"X", "+[[X]-X]-F[-FX]+X", "-[[X]+X]+F[+[FX]-X]", "F[-X][+X]"},
{"+", "+", "+", "+"},
{"-", "-", "-", "-"},
{"[", "[", "[", "["},
{"]", "]", "]", "]"}};

My redbud that I made is more of a youngling and exhibits the looks of a fully fledged teenager. This one was fairly easy as I just swapped the signs within the rules array for the ‘X’ row.

String axiom = "X";
String [][] rules = { {"F", "FF", "FF", "FF"},
{"X", "F-[[X]+X]+F[+[FX]-X]", "F+[[X]-X]-F[-FX]+X", "F[-X][+X]"},
{"+", "+", "+", "+"},
{"-", "-", "-", "-"},
{"[", "[", "[", "["},
{"]", "]", "]", "]"}};

The Emerald Green Arborvitae have a great shape to them already but with some pruning you can cut them up into numerous shapes. One this one I changed the Axiom string to help make the plant grow upwards and not so wide.

String axiom = "[-X][+X][-FFX][+FFX]F[-FX][+FX]FF[-X][+X]FF[-X][+X]FF[-X][+X]FF[-X][+X]";
String [][] rules = { {"F", "FF", "F", "F"},
{"X", "F[-X][+X][FX]", "F[-X][-X][-FX][FX]", "F[+X][+X][+FX][FX]"},
{"+", "+", "+", "+"},
{"-", "-", "-", "-"},
{"[", "[", "[", "["},
{"]", "]", "]", "]"}};

To complete my coaster set I made a CS 491 Computational Fab coaster. No coding necessary on this one. But completes the set nicely.

The main code can be found below.

https://handandmachine.org/classes/computational_fabrication/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ChristoherO_NeillLA1_Arborvita.zip