Week 20 (May. 11- May. 17) Challenges & First Step

Generation of attraction points

The attraction points influence the overall appearance of the generated tree model. To give users the biggest freedom to generate the tree with the shape they want, we would like to include as many types of volumes as possible in which the attraction points are distributed uniformly or with certain patterns. On the way to realize it, we could foresee the following challenges:

Challenge 1: Enable points generation within multiple types of volumes (typically the basic 3D objects in Unity, i.e. cube, sphere, capsule, cylinder, plane, and quad)

Challenge 2: Deal with attraction points in the overlay spaces of volumes

• need to traverse volume to judge whether overlay happens when a new volume is added

• hard to deal with complex volumes

Challenge 3: Add volumes from UI

Challenge 4: Uniform distribution in different types of volumes

Space colonization algorithm

Once the volume containing random points exists in the scene, the job is left to the Space Colonization Algorithm to grow the branches and fill up the available space.

The first step for implementing this algorithm is defining a Branch class. It represents a segment with a certain length. It should also store a position in three dimensions along with its parent node and a list of any child nodes. The data structure here can be very similar to a doubly linked list. Another important element in this class is the directional vector indicating in what direction this segment will grow towards.

A Branch Class