Differential Growth Addon for Blender
boris.okunskiy.name
boris.okunskiy.name
A few years ago I asked myself "Why spend hundreds of hours sucking at video games when I could spend the same time sucking at Blender?"
Since then I have spent many an enjoyable evening making terrible 3d models, some of which actually made it into a game. Apart from my lack of skill, there is no reason why somebody like me can't do world-class renders in a piece of software they downloaded for free. It isn't even that hard to use any more.
Somebody actually nominated my interactive fiction game for a best graphics ribbon, which amused me no end.
I have often thought that we spend too much time studying and trying to emulate the great artists, musicians, and writers. It is more productive to see what the mediocre talents are doing, how their works succeed, and try to copy their techniques. Even if you fail you will find your own voice and produce something distinctive.
Please come and repeat this in front of my students.
https://www.blendernation.com/2023/07/25/differential-growth...
If this were recreated in Blender’s geo nodes these functions would be relatively easy to add using the raycast node.
I think the differences are a lot less significant with other modeling-focused DCCs like Maya, Max, and C4D. All great programs in their own right. Maya really is an incredible tool for character animation, C4D is so killer for motion graphics type stuff… but they’re all much closer to blender for their intended use cases.
I was speaking to someone who worked at a very large animation production studio. They took a serious look at Blender to see if they could accommodate it in their pipeline. This would have saved them a ton of money. Some of the reasons they did not I list below. At the top of the list are the things that affected us in our move.
- Max and Maya are insanely fast at loading large files. On our school computers, importing a 5 gb .obj can take minutes, as opposed to seconds in Max/Maya.
- In Blender Managing large files is similarly slow, only possible by using linked proxies.
- In Max/maya the Arnold render engine comes with proxy management that makes loading large textures manageable.
- May/max are much better for chartecter animation, though Blender seems to be catching up.
- If Max does become unresponsive, it has cool tools such as delaying the screen re-draw for a defined number of seconds.
For the studio in question
- any bug they encountered could be addressed overnight by Autodesk support. Maybe Blender has got close to this with their long term support plan. Don’t know.
- max/maya are comprehensively documented, Blender is not.
All that being said, Blender is certainly finding a place in smaller studios. Simply: it inspire love. The re-factor and UI re-design a few years ago kick-started this.
The artists I know have very little love for max/maya. They use it because they have to. There has been near zero new features in these apps for years and max in particular can be clunky to use. Developers like Tyson Ibele have taken over adding new features with their plugins (check out his tyflow add on which replaces pflow).
Houdini is another matter. Development has been fast and users love it. I believe that in a few years this will have taken a large chunk out of Autodesk’s business.
I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.
that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.
What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.
From what I understood is that you need to recompile Blender to add a new node, even if it is just one which renders a simple line. Blender (like Maya) can do this in Python, but for many things this is not enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1701864.Morphogenesis
I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt
If for some irrational reason you choose to believe in the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, then you might not like to hear what Turing thought about that, which P. T. Saunders mentions in the foreword to Turing's collected works, citing what Hodges wrote about and quoted Robin Gandy saying in his "excellent biography":
For Turing, however, the fundamental problem of biology had always been to account for pattern and form, and the dramatic progress that was being made at that time in genetics did not alter his view. And because he believed that the solution was to be found in physics and chemistry it was to these subjects and the sort of mathematics that could be applied to them that he turned. In my view, he was right, but even someone who disagrees must be impressed by the way in which he went directly to what he saw as the most important problem and set out to attack it with the tools that he judged appropriate to the task, rather than those which were easiest to hand or which others were already using. What is more, he understood the full significance of the problem in a way that many biologists did not and still do not. We can see this in the joint manuscript with Wardlaw which is included in this volume, but it is clear just from the comment he made to Robin Gandy (Hodges 1983, p. 431) that his new ideas were "intended to defeat the argument from design".
This single remark sums up one of the most crucial issues in contemporary biology. The argument from design was originally put forward as a scientific proof of the existence of God. The best known statement of it is William Paley's (1802) famous metaphor of a watchmaker. If we see a stone on some waste ground we do not wonder about it. If, on the other hand, we were to find a watch, with all its many parts combining so beautifully to achieve its purpose of keeping accurate time, we would be bound to infer that it had been designed and constructed by an intelligent being. Similarly, so the argument runs, when we look at an organism, and above all at a human being, how can we not believe that there must be an intelligent Creator?
Turing was not, of course, trying to refute Paley; that has been done almost a century earlier by Charles Darwin. But the argument from design had survived, and was, and indeed remains, still a potent force in biology. For the essence of Darwin's theory is that organisms are created by natural selection out of random variations. Almost any small variation can occur; whether it persists and so features in evolution depends on whether it is selected. Consequently we explain how a certain feature has evolved by saying what advantage it gives to the organism, i.e. what purpose it serves, just as if we were explaining why the Creator has designed the organism in that way. Natural selection thus takes over the role of the Creator, and becomes "The Blind Watchmaker" (Dawkins 1986).
I think I will not be far off, speaking for the community, that many would love to own a copy. If that costs and an arm and a leg, so be it.
Another sidenote, any chance of seeing the usenet archives back ? Was very happy when Google purchased it. Thought we would get a better UI, better indexed presentation ... then it disappeared
https://kagi.com/search?q=differential+Growth+vs+L+system%3F...
One of the things that attracted me to 3D was Maya’s magnificent paint effects system, which is lsystem-based. This was begging to be spun off as a separate product.
Differential Growth and L-systems are both concepts used in modeling biological growth, particularly in plants, but they approach the subject from different angles.
Differential Growth
Definition: Differential growth refers to the varying rates of growth in different parts of an organism, leading to shape formation and structural changes. This concept is crucial in understanding how plants adapt their forms in response to environmental stimuli (like light and gravity) and internal signals (like hormones).
Mechanism: It involves the controlled distribution of growth factors and varying growth rates among different tissues. For example, in plants, differential growth can lead to bending or twisting of stems and leaves, as seen in the formation of the apical hook during germination12.
Applications: This concept is used in various fields, including biology, architecture, and design, to create models that simulate how structures grow and change over time3.
L-systems (Lindenmayer Systems)
Definition: L-systems are a mathematical formalism introduced by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 for modeling the growth processes of plants. They use a set of rules (productions) to rewrite strings of symbols, which can represent different parts of a plant.
Mechanism: An L-system starts with an initial string (axiom) and applies production rules to generate new strings iteratively. These strings can be interpreted graphically to create complex plant structures. L-systems can be context-free or context-sensitive, allowing for a wide variety of growth patterns45.
Applications: L-systems are widely used in computer graphics for simulating plant growth, generating fractals, and even in architectural design6.
Differential L-systems
Integration: Recent developments have combined differential growth principles with L-systems, known as differential L-systems. This approach allows for more realistic simulations of plant growth by incorporating the effects of differential growth rates into the L-system framework78.
Functionality: In differential L-systems, the growth rules can depend on local conditions, such as the density of neighboring structures or external environmental factors, enhancing the realism of the generated models46.
Summary
Differential Growth focuses on how different parts of an organism grow at different rates due to various factors, leading to complex shapes.
L-systems provide a rule-based framework for simulating plant growth through string rewriting.
The combination of both concepts in differential L-systems allows for advanced modeling that captures both the structural complexity and the dynamic nature of biological growth.
References
[1] Differential growth and shape formation in plant organs www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[2] A Model of Differential Growth-Guided Apical Hook Formation in Plants www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[3] Interactive differential growth simulation for design - GitHub Pages em-yu.github.io
[4] (PDF) Modeling Growth with L-Systems & Mathematica www.researchgate.net
[5] Modeling plant development with L-systems - Algorithmic Botany algorithmicbotany.org
[6] [PDF] L-systems and partial differential equations∗ - Algorithmic Botany algorithmicbotany.org
[7] Differential L-Systems Part 1 | Houdini 20 - YouTube www.youtube.com
[8] Differential L-Systems Part 2 | Houdini 20 - YouTube www.youtube.com
Now my question was - is this an L-system or another one. Not what are L-systems which are. As far as I get from your reply, the plug-in does not facilitate. Thanks.
This is one of those moments where I can feel my capabilities grow in real time. Thank you for making this, and thank you for making this open source.