Plant Growth Simulation

This project is a simulation of plant growth dynamics that models both above-ground branches and leaves and below-ground root development. It incorporates environmental factors such as sunlight, temperature, and soil moisture to drive growth patterns, branching behavior, and flowering. The project is fully modularized with well-defined components for simulation, scalar fields, GUI control, and visualization.

Features

• Modular design with separate modules for simulation logic, scalar fields, GUI controls, and main entrypoint.
• Editable simulation parameters via a PyQt6-based parameter control GUI prior to running.
• Environmental scalar fields influencing growth: sunlight, temperature, and moisture, accelerated by Numba.
• Branching and bifurcation dynamics for shoots.
• Root growth adapting to soil moisture.
• Flower blooming triggered in late growth cycles.
• Interactive 2D visualization using PyQtGraph in a 1366x768 window for real-time viewing of plant structure.
• Reliable PyQt6 event loop with immediate logging and consistent parameter usage.
• High-performance computation accelerated with Numba JIT.

Project Structure

• main.py: Main simulation and visualization code defining the Plant class and running the growth cycles.
• plantsim_config.py: Configuration file with simulation parameters such as domain size, growth rates, and flowering thresholds.

Requirements

• Python 3.7 or higher

• Packages are listed in requirements.txt.

  You can install the required packages with:

  pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the Simulation

Run the main.py script to execute the simulation and open an interactive window showing the plant growth over a series of discrete time cycles:

python main.py

The window displays:

• Green lines for branches.
• Brown dashed lines for roots.
• Light green scatter points for leaves.
• Colored scatter points for flowers blooming after a threshold cycle.

Visualization Examples

Below are example images showing the plant growth simulation output for different growth scenarios (only the config parameters are changed):

Configuration

Modify parameters in plantsim_config.py to customize the simulation, including:

• Domain dimensions (WIDTH, HEIGHT, SOIL_DEPTH)
• Growth rates for branches and roots
• Branch angle variation and branching probability
• Timing and appearance parameters for flowers

Development Notes

• The computationally intensive parts use Numba's njit and parallelization.
• Visualization uses PyQtGraph for efficient graphics rendering.
• Logging outputs cycle progress and statistics in the console.

License

This project is open source and free to use under the MIT License.

Author

Shreyak Chakraborty

Acknowledgments

Inspired by plant growth models and environmental factor-driven simulations.