Vivarium (Aergia)

Prototype framework for making procedurally generated stylized plants. Part of the PROCJAM 2017.

Click to generate new trees. That's it.

This is the first steps towards a (hopefully) ongoing project of making tiny procedurally generated gardens or terrariums. Instead of focusing on making something that is realistic or fully procedurally generated I wanted something that could create plants (or other things) in a recognizable stylized way from a simple set of rules and shapes. The scene above was an attempt to recreate the trees from this short scene from the movie Coraline:

It's basically just stringing a few simple Bezier curves together and generating a cylinder mesh along those paths. (The leaves are just flat, colored planes here). There's quite a bit more going on under the hood than shown here, so I hope to add more scenes soon. Maybe start a devlog.

The core of the generator is a combination of what I learned from two different tutorials:

• Curves and Splines, Catlike Coding
• Modelling by numbers, Jayelinda Suridge

After watching the great introduction to grammar systems by Rachel Hwang in this years procjam talks I'm thinking that might be a logical next step. In addition I'm hoping to add more stuff over time:

• Custom shaders for colors and textures to be generated from the ground up and reacting on the space around them.
  • Vertex shaders for animating wind and other movement.
• Animating growth/generation
• Some sort of simple voxel based 'aether' system to give plants more awareness of their surroundings and affecting them.