Grow a single trunk into a fan of child segments. Each generation scales length, spreads angles, and paints by depth or palette. You keep every stroke inside the browser, then export a PNG when the silhouette feels right.
| Control | Effect on the drawing | Practical guardrail |
|---|---|---|
| Depth | How many recursive layers run before the algorithm stops. | Above ten with five-way fan-out fills the canvas fast. |
| Spread | Total angular window opened around the parent direction. | Narrow spreads read like lightning. Wide spreads read like shrubs. |
| Shrink | Each child length as a fraction of the parent segment. | Ratios near 0.9 need fewer levels. Ratios near 0.35 need more depth to reach the top. |
| Fan-out | How many new tips appear at every eligible joint. | Odd counts break perfect symmetry, which often looks more organic. |
| Palette | Maps depth or hue onto stroke color before the line draws. | Depth tint keeps focus on structure. Rainbow sells poster energy. |
| Stroke | Base width before the per-depth taper applies. | Thick strokes plus high depth exaggerate overlap and muddy fine tips. |
This page is a deterministic playground. Same sliders always yield the same graph of segments because nothing rolls dice between redraws.
You are watching a depth-first fan-out, not a physics simulation.
Branch count and depth multiply work in ways spreadsheets hide until the fan spins. Five children per node with a depth of eleven is not five times harder than depth two. Each extra level multiplies the frontier of segments you still have to visit.
We cap the slider at twelve so casual phones do not choke on accidental spikes. If you need publication scale vectors, trace the PNG in a vector tool or rebuild the recursion in code where you control batching.
The animation mode reveals growth layer by layer. Use the button when you teach someone why recursion depth matters. Skip the animation when you only care about the final still.
Biologists sketch drainage near estuaries with the same vocabulary urban planners use for one-way splits. You do not need a course in measure theory to notice how shrinking ratios change the silhouette.
Try a classroom demo: set fan-out to three, spread to seventy degrees, shrink to 0.55, depth to seven. Students see a filled crown. Drop shrink to 0.42 without touching spread and the figure breathes again.
Graphic designers often pair dendrites with negative space logos. Export at depth eight, open the PNG in your editor, invert colors, and you already know whether the branches read at thumbnail size.
Grammar-first artists should open the L-System Visualizer where axiom plus productions drive the turtle. Prefer a dedicated tree preset without tuning recursion by hand? The Fractal Tree Generator keeps the conversation shorter. For a classic geometric dendrite tied to McWorter’s construction, jump to the McWorter dendrite fractal page.
