Plant models

A plant model is a procedurally generated plant produced by the Helios plant-modeling engine. Unlike a scanned plant — which is a static snapshot of one individual — a plant model is parametric: you can change its age, species, position, growth parameters, and regenerate the geometry.

When you'd use one

• Method comparison — generate a "ground truth" plant with known geometry, simulate a scan of it, then test how well your reconstruction recovers the truth.
• Growth studies — render the same plant at multiple ages without collecting multi-temporal scans.
• Sensitivity analysis — morph one parameter (insertion angle, internode length) and observe the effect on derived metrics.
• Synthetic data generation — produce many labeled plants for training ML models.

Available species

Phytograph exposes the species library that ships with Helios, grouped into:

• Trees — almond, apple, walnut, pistachio, olive, citrus, and others
• Vines — grapevine
• Cereals — wheat, rice, maize
• Vegetables — tomato, lettuce, strawberry
• Weeds — various

The exact list updates with the bundled Helios version. Pick from the species dropdown in the Generate Plant popup.

How generation works

When you click Generate Plant, Phytograph:

1. Initializes the model at age 0.
2. Advances it day by day to the target age.
3. Returns the final mesh — stems, branches, leaves, optionally fruit.

Leaves and bark are rendered with the species' textures from the Helios plant library, with leaf silhouettes cut out by the image's transparency; untextured organs use their organ colors. See Meshes: Textures.

The same growth machinery is exposed live via the Age slider in the Plant panel, so you can scrub through development after generation.

Canopies

A canopy is a regularly spaced grid of plants of the same species and age — a synthetic crop stand or orchard block. Rather than placing plants one at a time, you specify a center, the spacing between plants in X and Y, and the number of columns and rows; Phytograph builds the whole grid in a single pass. A germination rate below 1.0 randomly leaves grid positions empty, mimicking a real stand with missing plants.

The entire canopy is returned as one merged mesh (a single object in the scene), which is convenient for whole-stand operations like simulating a LiDAR scan over the plot. See Generate a canopy.

Morphing a generated plant

Every plant exposes a set of morphable parameters:

• Geometry parameters (internode length, insertion angle, girth factor, …)
• Geometry scale (leaf scale, petiole length and radius, internode radius)
• Distribution parameters (some values are distributions, not scalars — uniform, normal, or constant)

Editing these and clicking Regrow rebuilds the plant with the new parameters at the current age. See Morph a plant.

What you can do with a plant model

Operation	Where
Change the age	Plant panel → Age slider
Change a parameter	Morph popup
Simulate a scan of it	Add a Scan location, then run Synthetic LiDAR Scan
Save a parameter preset	Morph popup → Export parameters
Load a parameter preset	Morph popup → Import JSON
Export the mesh	Standard mesh export