this is some kind of primitive lifeform generator.

When I was younger our biology teacher showed us something quite impressive: she let some water with a mix of wheat and oat rot for three weeks at the back of her yard. Then she asked us to check it with a microscope

the result was half funny, half scary for some hellish creatures had spawn from nihil.

The simplest were monocellular organisms, then we could find some very primitive worms but also some very complex life forms, with tentacles to feed and move.

hereunder you’ll find a nice document showing more or less what I’m talking about (it’s in french) all the links lead you to pictures of those things I’m talking about:
http://www.fao.org/

Actually I’ve been willing to do that for more than a year now, in fact that’s even why I started working on the Delauay triangulation. Iwanted to create procedural clusters of cells, the Voronoï diagram was meant to do that.

so here’s my output: (click to respawn)

there are two params: the size and the number of cores(nodes whatever).
Then the rest is processed automatically as follow:
the nodes are dispatched randomly around the center, triangulted, (pseudo-)Voronoied. then I use Keith Peters’ hulling algorithm to determine the perimeter of the core.
this being done, I extrude the hull and smooth it with a quadratic bezier algorithm.
after which I take the corners of the hull and spawn X limbs (tentacles) which lengths are picked randomly.
I also started using a basic IK length normalization to perform an IK on the limbs (might prove useful later).

here are the files
an important thing is that I reorganized the packages in a cleaner way, especially the Delaunay so that one can use it in a project.

Of course this could be pushed much further.
As shown on the pictures above, some are simply some clouds of nodes, hulled and smoothed. Others are more complex but can always be decomposed into simple elements, recursively set up by simple rules.
They could be animated, we could think of a better way to render them, more grainy, using a Sobel filter for example, we could have organs move inside the creautres, like breathing.

To tell the truth I don’t really care, I’m more intersted in the principle than in making 3000 types of creatures or high quality outputs (it could be endless).

To end up nicely, here’s the website of an artist working with balloons and making giant organic structures: http://www.jasonhackenwerth.com/ it has to be impressive.
and a short clip showing moving creautres: http://www.demoscene.tv/prod.php?id_prod=13561
first I thought they were created procedurally, it appears that no. I was a bit disappointed.
who cares.

Tags: actionscript, bacteria, flash, generator, lifeform