A GENERAL RANDOM COMBINATORIAL MODEL OF BOTANICAL TREES

We present a new mathematical model of botanical trees capable of simu lating the combinatorial structure of specific species based on their bifurcation ratios. We first describe a general combinatorial model of botanical trees for the purposes of synthetic imagery. We apply techn iques from probabilistic analysis to generate random combinatorial tre es and then model them as three-dimensional geometric trees. We choose modelling functions that are partially based on results from theoreti cal biology. By changing the underlying distribution used to generate the random combinatorial trees, we are able to produce images of a wid e variety of botanical trees. For example, just one parameter controls the branching from dichotomous to monopodial. We then parameterize th e model acording to Horton's first law. We implement our algorithm in L-systems, a popular botanical modelling language. (C) 1998 Academic P ress Limited.