jimfx

I am working on a WASM based procedural plant generator:

https://nodes.max-richter.dev https://github.com/jim-fx/nodarium

Pretty sure the gif is from the short movie Cosmo Laundromat by Blender Studios, would definitely recommend giving it a watch:

https://gooseberry.blender.org

Thanks for the Feedback!

I tend to get blond to those small usability bugs, so it is very valuable.

Should both be fixed in the coming days :)

Plantarium was also developed in Firefox ;)

I think you would be right that simulation was a bit misleading. In my experience, a simulation is related to time, and updated in discrete time steps. Maybe "Procedural Generation" would be a better term...

Thanks :) That came from some feedback I got the last time I posted this project to hn

That is a nice idea! The tricky part is going to be how to integrate animations without having to rebuild the entire mesh every frame... Though, I think it would be very easy to export a skeleton from the generator and then use that to animate the plant.

That's super cool! And thank you for the nice words :)

A rust/Wasm rewrite of the geometry generator is very much on the roadmap. Currently getting my feet wet with rust during advent of code.

I learned a lot about webgl and procedural geometry in the process of making this :)

Yup, I use github.com/oframe/ogl, which makes webgl a bit mor usable for the average programmer. You could also probably achieve the same thing with webgpu, but for the time being i have not yet had a reason to switch :)

One of my ideas is to build a virtual garden where your plants can grow and you have to take care of them tamagotchi style :)

Not connected to any scientific projects, just a nerd that likes plants. But projects can have a gbif.org id and then some extra information is loaded through the gbif api :)

Thank you so much, I love graph/node editors :)

You're right that it is procedurally based; however, I have not yet implemented L-Systems. I am a long-time Blender Nerd, and if you look in the GitHub repository, there is an ideas/blender-plugin.md file since last year. Unfortunately, I haven't found time to start building it since I spend most of my time trying to get my startup off the ground.

Thank you so much!

Thanks :) In my opinion we programmers tend to take our projects/ourselves too seriously so I like to add some sillyness here and there

Very good feedback, I should probably add a debounce to the automatic centering of the camera :)

I am currently away from home, don't have access to my pc and just saw that the post gained some traction. I am crossing my fingers ;)

Thank you so much :)

I have a lot of ideas for further usecases for this tool, and I am probably going to write my bachelor thesis about it :)

This sounds like a super nice idea! I had a similar idea, where you could use an adversarial neural network that creates random plants, and you would have a fitness function that determines how well a plant survives...

And contextfreeart looks super interesting!

Thanks for the ideas :)

:)

At the moment only .obj, but .gtlf/.glb and .fbx are planned!

I looked shortly at Rete.js but for some reason it did not immediately click for me? And I was already thinking about how to implement it myself, so I just did that.

BrowserStack is amazing for this, I just used the free tier, where you have like one minute with a remote safari session.

And can just open DevTools and look at the error. But it's a bit stressful because of the time limit

Nope, not really, some people mentioned L-Systems maybe in the future I will implement them in Plantarium. For me, they always seemed a bit too mathematically and structured and not so natural...

I am very creative in naming!

I am a huge blender nerd, so definitely! The development of this was 100% inspired by Jacques Luckes animation nodes.

Regarding safari, i just found out that window.structuredClone is not available in Safari, the fix should be out shortly!

Thank you! It was definitely not a rational decision implementing my own node system, but I wanted to explore how they work and what challenges there are to solve.

The most difficult thing was definitely the positioning of the connections and the scaling/transforming and converting between global coordinates and local coordinates.

Would recommend trying it though, it was a lot of fun!

A public gallery is very much on the roadmap, right now you can export and import projects as .json files and there are some examples you can import, the ui is a bit rough though...

I definitely want Plantarium to accommodate users who just want to play around, so that is valuable feedback!

Ahh, I just tested the website with browserstack, it seems like Safari doesn't have window.structuredClone, fixing right now!

Thank you for the feedback, that was actually super helpful.

Especially the idea of showing the connection between parts of the model and the nodes.

I am still working on the curve node, it is not really working the way i like it right now.

The local view is a fantastic idea as well!