segmented flowers

So... let me start off a little differently by saying: I'm not really all that thrilled with how this came out.

The basic idea was to model plants, flowers, as vertlet-based segments using distances constraints for each segment. In order to keep the plants upright, I added a new a "height constraint" to keep each vertlet a certain amount above the ground.

Additionally I rooted each plant's base point so it wouldn't wander off.

Next, I added rain by modeling each drop as a vertlet and testing it's previous and current coordinates again each segment (see below)

Here are the results:


You can click to toggle the rain. I think it might be improved using a better design for the plants (eg: that branching tree algorithm).

This partially scratched the itch I had to model dynamic plants, but not quite... Hopefully I'll turn up some more information on how to do properly at some point.

I think angular constraints might work...

Anyway, if you are interested, the code is available for whatever you like.