Lindenmayer system, or L-System, was introduced in 1968 by the biologist Aristid Lindemmayer, primarily conceived as a mathematical theory on plant development. In the bible of L-Systems, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (ISBN 0-387-97297-8), Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz wrote:
"The central concept of L-systems is that of rewriting. In general, rewriting is a technique for defining complex objects by successively replacing parts of a simple initial object using a set of rewriting rules or production."
An l-system is a rule like description of a 3D form. It contains descriptions of parts and how they should be assembeld together. The program reads a l-system description in and processes it into a 3D form which can then be outputed in several formats, including DXF and VOL.
The description is applied to itself a number of times - recursion levels - so fractal and recursive forms are very easy to describe in an l-system. That's why they are used a lot for plants and natural looking organic forms. By increasing the recursion level the form slowly grows and becomes more complex.
This program was written as a project to bring the remarkable DOS based L-System programs of Laurens Lapre (notation and C-based code) into the Windows environment utilising Delphi. This release is not intended as a final product, but as a starting point for further development.
