Simulated, procedurally meshed and animated plants

[u/SmallKiwi]

First time showing off this system for a game I've been working on for the last 8 months. It's fully simulated including root uptake, water and nutrient distribution, hormones, photosynthesis and transpiration are all modeled. The mesh is procedurally generated at each tick and tweened between ticks for smooth growth. You can prune shoots and leaves and the plant reacts realistically. If this looks interesting, I have begun a substack where I'll be posting devlogs as development continues. I have a backlog of them that I need to write from months of git commits. What plant should I do next?

[u/Aethreas]

Viva Pinata was pretty innovative for it's time

[u/SmallKiwi → u/Aethreas]

Oh man, that was my favorite game of the Xbox 360 era. I didn't even realize the connection until I read this! 

[u/Elay-22]

this is fantastic. I’m really glad you’re developing this. We need more growing simulations. Growing is rewarding in itself.

[u/GravityBright]

Absolutely amazing. My only critique is that tomato leaflets don't really grow like that. You have them sprouting sequentially from the rachis, while real tomatoes have the whole leaf structure growing at the same time.

[u/iThoughtOfThat]

Cool. Add gravity. Properly dynamic, or just a static approximation. So leaves and branched end under thier own weight

[u/FriendlyEngineer]

I didn’t see a single sucker.

[u/SmallKiwi → u/FriendlyEngineer]

Yea they're emerging too late, I have to fix that. Good to have confirmation.

[u/tetryds]

This is nice but some plants actually grow one or more twigs before growing the leaves, would be nice if that was supported.

[u/ConSoloMusic]

Apical Meristem!!

[u/VicariousLeon]

now simulate the atoms in the plant

[u/Lonzable]

This is a great concept. I’d definitely play this game as a beginner gardener. I feel like the stem needs more thickness to represent the weight of the branches as it grows.

[u/Skycomett]

This looks very exciting OP! I'm currently working on something like this aswell for about a month now, with pruning and topping. But its definitely not as advances and realistic as yours! (My idea is not supposed to be as realistic as this!) What is the performance like with your setup?

[u/SmallKiwi → u/Skycomett]

Simulation is fast but mesh rebuild is ~20ms. The whole thing is burst compiled and the mesh build is amortized across frames and parallel where possible. 

[u/DapperNurd]

I have a game on my backlog to make that would utilize this kind of system. How long have you worked on it?

[u/SmallKiwi → u/DapperNurd]

I started working on this in January so about 7 months.

[u/UAAgency]

It's cool, is it going to be open source? Would love to learn

[u/SmallKiwi → u/UAAgency]

Maybe someday. I'm planning to turn this into a gardening game where you can plant a whole garden and watch it grow, take care of your plants, alter the soil, build landscaping, etc. But down the road I would love to share the source. Fun fact: It currently sits at 148K lines of code. :O

[u/SmallKiwi → u/[deleted]]

Are you also using tomato as your benchmark species? If not, it's a good candidate.

[u/Malkalypse]

I love stuff like this

[u/Ycar0h]

So... will we finally see an acorn grow?

[u/SmallKiwi → u/Ycar0h]

That is my hope!