Kozinarium - Procedural Creature Generator

Denis Kozlov’s recent Procedural generator is a nicely expressive generator that makes creatures, rigs them, and then animates them.

I’ve posted about Denis’s previous work on generating aircraft, but while detailed hard surface modeling can be time-consuming, creatures have an additional set of constraints that leave me quite impressed with this new project.

As Denis describes it, the development process involved the distillation of an artist’s previous knowledge into a form that can be explained to the computer. Of course, the first step is that the developer has to understand the process themself.

There are two key points that I struck me in his writeup. The first is “recognize the patterns” or what I’ve been calling the underlying structure of the thing you’re generating. Figuring out what order to generate things in, what part is the steel frame and what part is the windows will guide the creation of the generator.

Second, creating “something seriously new” takes a level of understanding that goes beyond what tools are immediately available. In my opinion, this is particularly important when creating a tool that lets you do something new. Copying the existing ways of doing things tends to lead to getting stuck in the local maxima that has already been explored.

It’s one reason why I still use pencils and paper for designing generators: using a medium for design with completely different constraints than the medium for implementation helps you create a vision that isn’t limited by the easy affordances of the tools you are using to implement it.

Denis has a vision of a universal high-level content creation system, one that lets the user work in natural concepts that the machine understand the semantics of. (I’m reminded of the design ideas behind Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad.)

https://www.the-working-man.org/2018/04/procedural-bestiary-and-next-generation.html