The Plani Plant Animation Framework

The PLant ANImation (PLANI) framework allows a designer's ideas and decisions about virtual plants to be guided through a structured process that results in an animation of a plant. The process proceeds by selecting relevant objects with properties from four logically grouped domains to simplify implementation. The resulting grouped objects are used as the baseline parameters for the coding process to create the virtual plant. PLANI's construction is based on more than a thousand years of biological research, fifty years of functional-structural plant modelling, and ten years of ontology development, instantiated into an animation environment. PLANI ensures that, when designing virtual plants, a selection of objects derived from an appropriate ontology are considered, and that this selection depends on the purpose of the animation, e.g., whether it is for gaming animation, biological simulation, or film animation. The use of PLANI provides the developer with a framework that is flexible, covers a wide variety of structural, functional, and animation objects for plants, and provides classification of current computer algorithms by their applications to designing virtual plants.