Open source : PlantGL is an open source software and can thus be freely used and extended. Providing a standard graphic toolkit to the plant modeling community, it benefits in return of the tests and improvements of users.
Portable : PlantGL is available on major operating systems (GNU Linux, Microsoft Windows). It is also compatible with various plant modeling systems (L-studio, AMAP, etc.) and graphic toolkits (Pov-Ray, Vrml, etc.).
Simple : The intended audience is researchers of the plant modeling community with no knowledge in computer graphics. Researchers could create images to illustrate and explore their results.
Modular : PlantGL is composed of several independent modules like a geometric library, GUI components and Python wrappers. They can be used alone or combined in a specific application.
Hybrid System : Core computational components of PlantGL are implemented in the C++ compiled language for performance. In addition for flexibility of use, these components are also exported in the Python interpreted language.