The dialog designs are presented and briefly described in the order in which the user will typically use them, when modelling a plant.
| Project Palette
This is where the reusable observational data is kept. Elements can be added or removed. This includes branching point types and node materials.
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| Branching Point Editor
This editor dialog allows for three-dimensional branching points to be described. This includes the ability to define a variable number of daughter branches, each with a diameter, divergence, and twist. An interactive preview of the branching point is also provided.
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| Plant Topology Editor
This is where the a plant's topology is defined. The editor is fully interactive, where node may be created and positioned and arcs created between them. The graphical notion used here has been drawn from finite state automata theory.
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| Node Inspector
The contents of the node inspector dialog changes depending on the type of node being represented. This figure shows a sliced view of the dialog, where only the elements common to the two types of nodes (branch and object) are shown. Any changes made in this dialog are applied to the plant project immediately. Hence, this will update all sources and dialogs that refer to any this node, including the preview, if it is open. Please see the thesis for more details.
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| Arc Editor
This editor provides full access to arc properties, including: conditions, which branching point to apply when traversed, and the maximum variation of the specified branching point. Like the node inspector dialog, any changes made in this dialog are applied to the plant project immediately. Hence, this will update all sources and dialogs that refer to any this arc, including the preview, if it is open.
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| Material Editor
The material editor is used to describe re-usable materials that can be applied as properties of nodes. For example, it can be used to define a bark material for branches or a leaf texture for objects.
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| Project Preview
This dialog is used to visualise the plant model (architecture) using shaded and texture-mapped three-dimensional geometry. The (geometric) model may be positioned, scaled and rotated. More importantly, this dialog allows the geometry to be exported to a file (e.g. VRML). If branching point variations are being used in the plant model, then changing the random seed will produce different variants.
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