The OpenOcean for plant life
You don't download a plant. You describe one — a species, an age, a place, a moment — and it grows. Deterministic. Reproducible. Citable.
The idea
Not a folder of trees. A generative substrate you query for any plant, at any fidelity, at any moment of its life.
Everything downstream — a phone game, a film, a VR world, a climate simulation — asks the same question in a different accent: what would actually grow here, and what would it look like doing so? PhytoEngine is the authority that answers, the way a physics engine answers for gravity. Nobody should ship their own botany.
One plant · authored at every rung
Fidelity is an integer, 1 to 5, and it says how a plant was made — not how far away it is. Each rung is a separately grown asset from its own grow script, with its own full LOD chain; LOD is a different axis, and every rung carries one. Rungs 1 to 3 are built. Drag the slider for the ladder; under it, one real birch at each built rung.
The same birch, authored three ways
Same seed, same 18 metres, same pivot, and a
lod0–3 chain on each — so rung 2 can carry fewer triangles than rung 1 (leaf
cards replace solid foliage volumes) and still read better at walking distance. Ask for a
rung with ?fidelity=2 or ?max_fidelity=2 on
/api/v1/assets, or pick level 1 or 2 in the studio; rung 3 is built for a
few species and is not on the menu yet.
Time is an axis, not a snapshot
The same organism at age 2, 40, 300 — and past it. Growth and decay aren't different assets; they're one trajectory. Run a stand forward and ask what it becomes.
Where reference art enters
Reference photography, approved concept art, digitized specimen photos, player-submitted reference sheets — deposited, versioned and cited, the way a studio keeps a style bible. Every rendered plant can answer why do you look like this? and name the references that shaped it. Disagreement is first-class, not overwritten.
Betula papyrifera · 34 yr · 46.4°N moraine, N-slope · dry Septemberv9.2, seed 0x1F04ref:birch-bark-04 · concept art ref:birch-canopy-v2From one plant to a biome
Many plants competing for light, water and space over decades. Design a fantasy biome or a photoreal one and watch where it stabilizes — or collapses. Same engine, different requester.
Sketch a planting, forecast succession, choose between layouts before a single asset goes into the scene.
Paint an alien-but-plausible forest that obeys competition and spacing, not random scatter — so it reads as a place, not a texture.
Because it's built from cited, inspectable reference material, an art director can study the simulation — and when it diverges from the reference, that's a finding.
Invented species are held to the same standard as real ones — internally consistent growth, silhouette and material — so a fantasy biome still convinces.
The place everything that needs a plant goes to ask what it should look like.