Buds compete for light, and a whole tree crown emerges

Growing Trees

A procedural tree-growth method built on Palubicki et al.'s 2009 SIGGRAPH paper: buds compete for light in a voxel shadow grid, accumulated light becomes a growth resource that flows back up and splits at each junction, and successful buds sprout new shoots. A single bias parameter, lambda, swings crowns from spreading to a dominant leader, while self-pruning, phyllotaxis, and a pipe model for girth fill out the structure before twig-spray cards add foliage.