Julien Massaux Progress Report 2

Julien Massaux

Progress Report 2

The Issue now is tree growth and seeding. I decided it was about time to talk to the second professor,  Professor Hosni, with a more competent background in Unity development than I could assist me in driving project development forward . I needed to discuss the issues with the variations of the tree growth. With Sen’s original design being very rigid in its pattern, I was tasked with adjusting her code and designing a unique and interesting way to add curvature and organic shapes to the tree itself. 

While talking to Professor Hosni, he recommended I find a more efficient way of adding the unique curves to the tree growth instead of implementing a mathematical algorithm to determine growth. He said to use a shader to emulate the same outcome. He also recommended I find a 3rd party software “Speed Tree” to see if there was any resource I could collect and use. I agreed and thus decided to do some searching which unfortunately led both Sen and I to a terrible discovery. Sen’s use of the line renderer in the tree growth had no way of communicating with a shader meaning it had to be done algorithmically and the SpeedTree which worked in a 3D environment would have required a total rewriting of the tree growth by Sen. I had no idea where to start and Sen was too busy developing the more nuanced aspects of the project so it was up to me. 

Ultimately, I looked over some documentation and how the curves of the line renderer could be edited, but for it to be natural it needed to be programmed so that each branch element relied on the information and curvature of the previous element without completely rewriting the tree growth code. I inevitably had far too many specific questions for stack overflow to realistically help me with. I ended up using ChatGPT to answer my more driven questions about implementation as well as what kind of syntax I would need to use to even get to where the tree growth is now. I went with Professor Hosni’s recommendation of playing with the curve of the line renderer and lerping some points for fluidity and scale. In its current state the tree does have a more organic form factor that I will also need to coincide with seeding for a more diverse reaction to user input. 

Meeting Notes____

doing curves might be too complicated

use a shader for flowing form

lerp position and scale

adjust line renderer distance and adjust curves

play with curve of line renderer

highlight areas with exposed variables (equation curve can be more randomized)

any parameter that will have a visual effect should have some randomization.

alternative approach to leaves, look at “Speed Tree” middleware for tree generation

see if you can copy some of its code where its useful apply it to tree

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work on elements around tree creation to speed up development

procedural tree