So, I was looking for a picture of a tree and found some nice pictures of fractal trees. That, I thought, would be interesting to code. Here are some of the results. This was coded in C#, each element ( a trunk/branch/twig ) is a fractal, a twig with a length < 3 aborts the recursive fractal generator and is given its very own leaf! Yes. I am that generous. Each leaf is coloured acording to the season (in winter, trees are bare (no I don’t post analyse tree shape to determine species)). Some trees come out looking very geometric, almost like a Roman tile mosaic, others look like Cornish bushes and some just look like apple trees.
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 argh! Geometric hell… |
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 this looks like a tree that grows in my dads garden. |
 winter |
 Cornish hedge? |
 tree: designed by computer |
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Stuff I could do to improve the program.
The most glaring problem is the width of the trunk, trees are usually wider than one pixel.
Make the tree from curves rather than straight lines.
And some other stuff, like how often branches split, the length of various parts of branches, branches in real life almost always head towards the sun…
But this isn’t a tree simulator, it’s a fractal generator that happens to make fractals that look like trees, so what’s the point of adding complexity to such a simple program? Almost none.
Other tree articles I have written: The original tree, sock tree, vine trees, interactive flash tree