Turtle geometry and scenes

Alejandro Morales

Centre for Crop Systems Analysis - Wageningen University

<!– Explain the PlantGeomTurtle package –>

Meshes

The geometry in VPL consist of 3D triangular meshes. These meshes are used for 3D visualization and for ray tracing, buy may also be exported to external formats or used in other Julia packages. Most of the time, the geometry is generated from graphs using the concept of turtle geometry. In addition to generating the meshes, it will also be necessary to associated colors (for rendering) and material objects (for ray tracing) for each triangle in the mesh. All these components are then stored in a Scene object.

Meshes are collections of vertices, normal vectors and faces (which specify combinations of vertices that form triangles). They are implemented in the object Mesh. All vectors and points are represented by the type Vec. Any vector may be constructed by calling Vec(x, y, z) with the coordinates of the vector.

Meshes can be imported from external formats using the PlantGeomPrimitives.load_mesh() function and exported using the PlantGeomPrimitives.save_mesh() functions. The file formats supported include STL, OBJ and PLY (see documentation on functions for details).

Meshes are not meant to be modified directly by the user (unless adhoc geometry is needed). Instead, a series of functions are provided to generate meshes associated to different geometries. These functions are called primitive constructors and can be combined to generate more complex geometries. The primitive constructors maybe used to generate geometry procedurally with a turtle (see below), or to create the mesh directly (e.g., when adding geometry to an existing scene).

Turtle geometry

The idea behind turtle geometry is to generate geometry procedurally by imagining a turtle that moves through the scene and is fed triangular meshes. This allows to generate any geometry by defining a sequence of instructions that the turtle will execute. These instructions are defined locally (e.g., turn right, move forward, etc.) and update the turtle position and orientation, such that a global geometry is generated after the instructions are executed.

The internal state of the turtle is defined by its position and three axis of rotation:

  • Position (pos): The location of the turtle in the scene.
  • Heading (head): The direction in which the turtle is heading. Moving forward

would mean moving along this direction. A rotation around the head vector is called a roll (imagine a turtle spinning on its head).

  • Arm (arm): A direction perpendicular to head but on the same plane. A

rotation around the arm vector is called a pitch (imagine a turtle turning up or down).

  • Up (up): A direction perpendicular to the plane of the turtle. A rotation

around the up vector is called a yaw (imagine a turtle turning left or right).

To generate geometry, that matches the morphology of a plant, the turtle in VPL is fed a graph. This means that the first instructions to the turtle will be given by the first node in the graph. The turtle will then traverse the entire graph, resetting its state at each branching point in the graph. The instructions to the turtle are given by methods of the feed!() function, defined for all the possible nodes in graph.

Two types of instructions are available to the turtle: movement operators and primitive constructors. The former are used to change the internal state of the turtle without adding geometry to the scene, while the latter generate a 3D mesh associated to a particular geometry (a special primitive constructor Mesh! accepts any mesh generated by the user). The different movement operators are given below, while the primitive constructors are given here.

In addition, the turtle will contain a message field that can be assigned any user-defined value. This is useful to pass information to feed!() methods described below (e.g., to control the code executed by those methods). All the methods that create an internal turtle (e.g., Scene or render) will accept an optional message argument that will be passed on to the turtle.

Movement operators

Movement operators as provided as functions that manipulate the state of the turtle in-place (e.g. ra!), as well as nodes that can be used inside a Graph object (e.g., RA). The functional version will be in lowercase, while the node version will be in uppercase. The functional version can be used inside any feed!() method, which reduces the number of nodes that need to be inserted into a graph.

Below are all the movement operators available in VPL (in their node form):

the head, arm and up vectors.

pos, head, arm and up vectors.

the turtle towards the Z axis of the scene).

Scenes

A Scene object contains three elements that are connected:

  • A triangular mesh (a Mesh object) that contains all the geometry of the

scene.

  • The colors associated to each triangle in the mesh (objects that inherit from

Colorant from the ColorTypes.jl package). This is needed for 3D rendering.

  • The Material objects that defined the optical properties of each triangle.

This is needed for ray tracing of radiation.

Only the first element is required to create a scene. The other two are optional and are only necessary if you want to render the scene or perform ray tracing on the scene.

Creating a scene

The simplest way to create a scene is to use the Scene constructor on a Graph object or a vector of Graph objects. This will create internally a Turtle which then generates the geometry, colors and materials of the scene via the feed!() methods defined by the user. VPL will take care of ensuring that triangles are connected to their corresponding colors and material objects.

A scene may also be created internally by render() when applied to a Graph object or a vector of Graph objects. However, this scene cannot be retrieved so it is not possible to modify it or reuse it for ray tracing. The ray tracer will not create a scene internally, so for that purpose the user will need to create the scene explicitly.

It is possible to add elements to an existing scene using the add!() method which allows to add a mesh to the scene (and optionally the corresponding colors and/or materials).

Multiple scenes can also be merged into a single one by calling Scene() on a vector of Scene objects. This allows for parallel construction of scenes which are then merged together.

The feed!() method

In order to use the turtle to generate a scene from a graph, the user will need to define a feed!() method for each type of node stored in the graph (at least the ones that require geometry). This method will be called by the turtle when it encounters a node of that type. When no method is present, the turtle will simply move to the next node in the graph.

The feed!() method takes three arguments: the Turtle, the node and the graph- level variables (of the graph the node belongs to). The latter does not have to be used, but it may be useful if information at the plant level is required to generate geometry, colors or material objects (most often the information is stored inside the node itself). It is important that the second argument (the node) is annotated by its type and that the PlantGeomTurtle prefix is used to ensure that a method is created. For example, for a node of type Internode the function should be defined as:

function PlantGeomTurtle.feed!(t::Turtle, n::Internode, vars)
    <code here>
end

Inside the feed!() method, the user can apply any of the movement operators described in the previous section as well as the turtle-specific primitive constructors (see section on Primitives). All these changes will be applied to the turtle's internal state. The feed!() method should not return anything.

It is also possible to execute different code inside the feed!() method based on the message stored in the turtle. This allows for example to generate different geometries for visualizations and ray tracing, or to use different colors for visualization. Since the message can be any object created by the user, it may also be used to pass information to the feed!() method, though most often the relevant information is stored in the node or graph.