Helios is a flexible and scalable 3D plant modeling framework made available as an open source library. Helios is computationally efficient, enabling of the simulation of large, canopy-scale problems at high detail. It allows for high flexibility in terms of generation and manipulation of geometry, including several plug-ins for procedural plant generation including dynamic growth. The radiation model is a strength of Helios, which can efficiently represent direct and diffuse solar radiation, artificial light sources, longwave emission, scattering, and radiation-based camera simulation. Many other model plug-ins are available relevant to plant-environment interaction simulation.
Helios is written in C++ and uses NVIDIA libraries for some model plug-ins to maximize performance. However, users interact with Helios through high-level functions that require little C++ expertise. The ‘Project Builder’ plug-in has been recently released for beta testing that provides a graphical interface for running models (additional capabilities will be gradually incorporated).
