Don Havey

A couple of years ago I was walking home from work and thinking about how writing to a blog is often a one-way process. Like talking to a wall. The most important part of the process, for most bloggers, is the creation of an entry: the release of words. The importance of readability decreases quickly after an entry has been written. Frequently it is an introspective process, like writing to a diary or talking to yourself.

I thought, I would like to create objects from blog entries. Objects that would contain the words in the entry and grow as more words are added, but remain illegible, thereby deemphasizing the creation of a document.

To make a long story short: I decided that a tree would be an appropriate object: it grows in a recognizable fashion and can expand nearly indefinitely. The lettertree concept was born.

This tutorial will explain how I approached the lettertree problem. It relies on our existing Tree class. We’ll create paths from the root of the tree to each “bud” and randomly select one of these paths to carry a letter. We’ll also increase the thickness of the tree branches as the thing grows.

Here’s what it looks like: The final result

Here’s what you need: Lettertree classes

Note that like many of the applets I post, I’ve switched the rendering method from OpenGL to P3D for the in-browser sample. The OpenGL results will look way better and (typically) run faster within the Processing environment, but the latest version of the Java plugin is so immensely bloated that P3D seems to render faster in a browser.

Ready to begin?

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Today’s tutorial is going to be shorter and sweeter than the last.

The problem we’ll address is how to structure a tree-like object in a way that’s similar to a real-life tree. It must contain a set of user-defined variables that affect the “species” of tree, but still allow some random variation within the tree’s growth.

I created something similar to this a couple years ago, but have reworked it to be simpler and more efficient. We’ll be using this Tree object in the “Lettertree” tutorial to come…

Here’s the finished product: Recursive tree

And here are the classes: Recursive tree classes

Let’s take a look at what we’ll be learning:

• Transforming points in three dimensions
• Randomizing variables
• How to structure a recursive object

And now why would we want to learn it…

The use for a recursive tree

The most obvious reason to write a tree generating script is… to generate trees. It would be fairly simple to export the coordinates of this tree into any 3D modeling software. Texture mapping and such would be tricky, because as you’ll see, this script uses segments as branches, not three-dimensional shapes. But nevertheless, it would be a nice addition to your next architectural project: some non-generic, bare trees in the landscape.

Of course, branching structures are used in more than just trees. Let me know if you think of other uses. Maybe something like… plotting three-dimensional decision making graphs? Where the sum of a user’s choices is represented by a single point within a cloud of possible outcomes? That could be a nice way of comparing the results of a survey in three dimensions.

And now, let the games begin…

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