Incremental Rules for Growing Plants

L-systems are widely used for plant modeling and simulation, with remarkable results. However, we argue that the mathematical formalism underpinning L-systems encourages inefficient rendering of plants which grow and change over time. We propose new types of rules which emphasize the incremental nature of change in a plant’s elements, and highlight an element’s relationships with other components (e.g. a plant limb has a parent, children, and occurs at a certain level in the overall structure). We have implemented a Java 3D prototype using this approach, and compare it with code using a standard L-system.