Poe's tree

Abstract

This artwork is inspired by the short story "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Alan Poe. The story follows William Legrand, his servant Jupiter and an unnamed narrator on their quest to uncover a buried treasure. Poe took advantage of the popularity of cryptography as he was writing the "The Gold-Bug" and his story revolves around the team trying to solve a cipher. The characters in the story follow a simple substitution cipher to decode a message that eventually leads them to the treasure.

With this project, the aim was to re-encode the decrypted text into a digital form and turn it into a 3d tree. In order for this to be achieved, the following process was used: 1) Using Chomky's Context-Free-Grammar, the text was broken down into a syntax tree. 2) By using a simple substitution process, like the one used by Poe, the syntax tree was turned into an L-systems syntax. 3) The tree was then generated using the build-in L-Systems function in Houdini 4) Maya was used to stylize, texture and render the 3d tree.