Show HN: Simulate 3D plants in the browser

MrLeap · 2023-12-03T15:36:52

This is so useful and nice for so many reasons.

A well written browser based node graph editor that can create procedural 3d meshes _and_ export as .obj _and_ you've permissively licensed it. This could be the seed for a whole host of procedural tools. Thank you Jim.

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:08:24

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 :)

NelsonMinar · 2023-12-03T16:15:55

I'm impressed with the complexity here. For folks wanting to take it for a quick spin... The tutorial is great but takes a few minutes to get to the fun. Instead just play with the sliders in the right pane and see how it modifies the fern. Also click library and load some other models to see what it can do.

You can tell this is brand new because there are no penises to load in the user submitted models yet.

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:10:36

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 ;)

baalimago · 2023-12-04T05:16:43

I did something similar a year ago where I wanted to try out Rust as a webapp engine (compile to wasm -> host on rust webserver): https://blomma.lorentz.app. Although yours is miles better on the productification station, cudos! The real selling point is the nodegraph editor, blends really well to the workflow and brings it down from a debugging tool to a product which may be used by anyone.

Only improvement mine has is bezier curves, for both the leaf shape and stem shape. It was (to me) quite a challenge to get both the topology and triangulization right, but a great intro to quaternions and nice refresher on trigonometry. I'd recommend giving a bezier curve node a go.

Tiberium · 2023-12-03T15:55:33

Looks very nice, one small problem - when I change the values, the camera seems to "shake" because the shape of the plant changes, so it has to constantly readjust, and it's kind of annoying (at least for me). Maybe it could be possible to freeze the camera while the parameters are being changed?

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:15:56

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

andrewflnr · 2023-12-03T16:49:19

Probably best to animate the camera change afterward when it relaxes, too...

hx2a · 2023-12-03T15:09:52

This is a neat project but it doesn't seem to render the plant at the moment. It did render plants 20 minutes ago - perhaps the HN load has hurt it?

All of the code is available online, with great documentation. There is, in fact, a server back end for this project:

https://github.com/jim-fx/plantarium/tree/main https://github.com/jim-fx/plantarium/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE....

I will be back in a few days when it is working again.

djsavvy · 2023-12-03T16:14:42

It’s back up

phito · 2023-12-03T15:48:01

That is extremely cool! I like the stem 'thiccness' parameter :)

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:18:25

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

ninju · 2023-12-03T17:23:50

For those that did not know (like myself), you can slide the right hand panel to expose more parameters/controls

seism · 2023-12-03T16:40:20

Fantastic. I can't wait to see a whole forest of crowdsourced algorithmic plants. Is this connected to any scientific projects? A cool feature would be an AI botanist that tells you how likely your plant would survive, what's the closest taxonomic reference, a nice recipe to go along with boiled rice,...

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:37:33

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 :)

spacecadet · 2023-12-03T15:40:28

Super cool! Ive been building some 2D simulations using Pygame lately, so enjoy a good simulation project!

i_am_a_peasant · 2023-12-03T21:26:08

As far as I can tell this uses WebGL, I wonder if you could get these results just as easily using WebGPU

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:40:06

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 :)

i_am_a_peasant · 2023-12-04T00:16:03

Awesome. I think I will switch from rust to typescript on the front end and do something similar in WebGPU. Before I did some wasm stuff with the wgpu crate but the fact that wasm can't reach the DOM is a bit of a headache and the gains in performance from WASM seem to be offset by the fact that I still need to create a sort of communication channel between wasm and js if I want my 3D app to talk to a websocket.

Your project is very motivating thank you for making this!

deLta30 · 2023-12-04T01:47:16

What did you learn to make this?

fb03 · 2023-12-03T15:35:43

Wow. Sending this to a bunch of tech art friends

catapart · 2023-12-03T15:37:01

Amazing! I love how immediate, and straightforward it is. Easy to understand and fun to play around with!

eternityforest · 2023-12-03T21:03:38

That is amazing, they really look like plants!

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:18:37

Thank you so much!

owenpalmer · 2023-12-03T18:33:12

The model visualizer is beautifully nostalgic... somehow.

owenpalmer · 2023-12-03T18:34:08

Reminds me of games from my childhood :)

Nition · 2023-12-04T02:07:57

It vaguely reminds me of the fractal tree generator that was in some versions of Microsoft Encarta.

uoaei · 2023-12-03T20:44:25

What makes this a simulation and not just a model?

Daub · 2023-12-03T22:34:46

I guess because it is procedurally based, likely using an L-system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

We use things like this in 3D art and animation. For example the paint system in Maya. This was used to create the forests in Shrek.

Question to OP… have you considered making this available as a Blender plugin?

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:24:30

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.

uoaei · 2023-12-04T01:59:35

That wouldn't make it a simulation, it's just a different way to generate 3D representations.

ur-whale · 2023-12-03T19:29:12

The graph editor is really, really well done, congrats.

jimfx · 2023-12-03T23:25:08

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

drumttocs8 · 2023-12-03T14:59:51

Very cool!

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