Budworks
An introduction to Budworks.
The idea of the program is to let the user specify a tree architecture and see this generated into a three dimensional representation of a tree.
Budworks depends on a simple, powerful and elegant idea. You won't often hear the idea spoken aloud, however, because it is botanically wrong! This idea is that:
The branch structure of a tree is a 3-dimensional 'drawing'. The drawing is made by the movement of buds through space over time.
Botanists know better. For a start, buds don't move like that: we should call it apical meristem material, or something, which doesn't scan so well. Anyway, if we ignore the botany for a bit and remember that what we call buds are really just the tips of growing stems, we can have some fun with this idea.
Instructing buds.
If the tree is built by the movement of buds then to grow a tree, all we need to do is start with a bud and give it some instructions. The instruction sets can be recursive, allowing extremely complex structures to be built from just a few instructions.It's a bit like an L-system, but we allow a bud to 'spawn' other buds, so that the tree is being drawn simultaneously at different places at the same time.
The Budworks software defines a "Bud Instruction Language" for issuing instructions to buds. This is a very simple language, with fewer than ten elements. The user types in a set of instructions and a tree is generated. The tree is then illustrated using Virtual Reality Modelling Language, providing a 3-D model of the tree.
This is how the software looks.
If you would like to explore this model yourself, then click here.
You will need to be using a browser capable of displaying VRML 2.0 scenes. Internet Explorer 4.0 or Internet Explorer 3.02 with the right plug-in installed is a good choice. Alternatively, you could use Netscape Navigator with a plug in such as CosmoPlayer.