"The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" is an awesome book on L-systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plan...

Seconded. It's really fascinating for anyone who is interested in the relationships between mechanistic generation and biological/natural artifacts.

For me, this book fits in the same family as Benoit Mandelbrot's "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", and Ulf Grenander's work on stochastic models for the generation of shapes like hands. And see also, cellular automata.

I'm not familiar with Ulf's work, but it sounds very interesting. I tried finding his work on stochastic models for shape generation but didn't find it. Mind pointing me in the right direction?

I like the approachable monograph —

https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387973869

But there is also the magisterial —

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pattern-theory-97801...

There is a lot of published work from this school, including the seminal Geman and Geman paper from 1984, one of the most cited works in engineering.

Followed by Turing's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...

Agreed, I have a first edition. There was a followup book, “The Algorithmic Beauty of Seashells”, which is also pretty good.

Does anyone know of a more recent book on the subject than that? I haven't been able to find any.

I really love the YouTube channel Coding Train [0] - he also made some videos about L-Systems which he also explains in his free book The Nature of Code [1].

My username for HN was inspired by the creator of L-Systems, hehe.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1B4UoSQMFw

[1] https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-8-fractals/

I'm always happy to see L-Systems! I find them really awesome, the base principle is very simple: string rewriting. But the results can really be impressive for such a simple concept.

I can't help but do a shameless self-plug: I'm developing an interactive L-System generator : https://github.com/epholys/procgen.

Here is a little demo: https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/b4kpa...

And here are the L-System I've produced: https://imgur.com/a/0Rx7uln

I've been seeing yours on reddit lately, very nice stuff!

>"the deepest thing I would like to communicate with you today...is we don't know how to design systems yet" ~ Alan Kay, OOPSLA '98

What would a Lindenmayer "toy" look like, I wonder?

pretty cool? See the 3D examples at the bottom of this post: http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2014/12/09/procedural-content-g...

This is an absolutely awesome reading, thanks for the upload.

Genuinely fascinating.

The most interesting thing I've seen done with L-systems is algorithmically compose music, which can have interesting self-similar, fractal like structures.