Eleanor B. Wunderlich Overview Our goal in this project is to create beautiful, artistic, and accurate renderings of physically-based plant models. Using plant models created by L-systems , we arrange and illustrate the models in the style of traditional botanical illustration . L-systems are a powerful tool for modeling plants. They can concisely and accurately model development and environmental interaction as well as visible physical characteristics. The goal of traditional botanical illustration is to create beautiful, botanically-accurate depictions of plants.
Watercolor is a favorite medium of botanical artists.
A botanical artist makes artistic decisions when illustrating a plant. The artist may bend stems, clip leaves and flowers, turn upward-facing flowers so that they face the viewer, and adjust leaves that come straight at the viewer so that they appear more in profile. The power of L-systems lies in their ability to generate complicated structures from a small number of rules, but the cost of this brevity is the lack of local control. Small changes made at the level of the L-system may affect the structure of the entire plant. In ilsa , L-system models are rendered simply to allow responsive interactive behavior, even for complex models.