Introduction Table of Contents Section 1

Visual Models of Morphogenesis: A Guided Tour

Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Mark Hammel, and Radomir Mech
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4
Abstract:
Rapid progress in the modeling of biological structures and simulation of their development has occurred over the last few years. It has been coupled with the visualization of simulation results, which has led to a better understanding of morphogenesis and given rise to new procedural techniques for realistic image synthesis. This hypertext document reviews models of morphogenesis with a significant visual component, which were developed or reproduced in the Computer Science Departments at the University of Regina (1987 - August, 1991) and the University of Calgary (September, 1991 - present). The material is based on papers [Pru1993, Pru1994a], which cover the topic in more depth and include more extensive lists of references.

Keywords: morphogenesis, simulation and visualization of biological phenomena, developmental model, reaction-diffusion, diffusion-limited growth, cellular automaton, L-system, realistic image synthesis.
If a natural object or organism demonstrates consistency of form [...], such symmetry is the consequence of Something rather than Nothing.

Adrian D. Bell [Bel1985]


Introduction Table of Contents Section 1