How would you make spore creature creator, to be procedural?

Hey ho.

A bit of "creative" procedural topic. Whatever call it. But trying keep it simplistic.

Well, I am sure everyone is quite familiar with Spore and its Creature Creator / Editor and what player can do with it.











My thought is that all spore creatures are / were done by players. Which is fine.
But if I would like to investigate some form of procedural AI / automated / randomizer systems, which tries to create, somewhat "resealable" creatures. How would you approach the problem?

• As entry point for the discussion purposes, I would take all constrains from the Spore Creature Creator, to simplify things. That including mirroring of body parts.

• Then one of my next thought would be, to first allow AI create a body. Perhaps more-less randomized shape, or with some "realistic" constrains. Whatever creator allows for.
• Then from that point, allow AI / system further attachments like limbs eyes and other features.
• My tinkering suggests, I would have to have some constrains. Maybe that mouth / jaw / eyes tends to be on forward parts of the body.
• Limbs would be whenever is space.
• And other optional attachments, spaced on the body.

I am sure, there is no need for highly complex mechanics. But any toughs are welcome.


On side note, I know there was some Unity 2D platformer game, made just few years back, which had procedural generated creatures. But I can not find it (I don't remember a name. Any ideas?

 

I imagine it depends on how diverse you want the creatures to be.

A torso seems like an obvious first step. Then a head. Then hands/legs off of the torso, and perhaps a tail.

Lots of Spore creatures look goofy but not very...evolutionarily advantageous. I'd stick with the fundamentals that nature provides and build off of there.

 

No need to reinvent the wheel. There are several academic papers on this subject. Check out Jon Hudson's Creature Generation using Genetic Algorithms and Auto-Rigging and Dan Lessin's Darwin's Avatars.

 

Thx guys for a feedback and resources so far.

@TonyLi, I skimmed through the papers you provided.
Actually I like the simplistic pseudo algorithm, which is included in.
The concept is neat.


This also made me as search a bit and I found this (fun side).
MYTHICAL BEAST GENERATOR
http://ianmart1n.github.io/mythicalbeasts/




It is very basics of generator, using existing components.
But such can be used as starting point, and allow them to evolve.

Principles of this concept, I understand are used in the above paper.


This is also nice, for case study
Creative Sketch Generation (DoodlerGAN)



https://github.com/facebookresearch/DoodlerGAN


And this is btw., what I have done so far.
Procedurally generated bodies, made of that little white capsule, using Shader Graph and vertex colors.

 

also for reference,
"Procedurally generate creatures in Unity - inspired by Spore"
https://github.com/daniellochner/SPORE-Creature-Creator

 

@mgear thx. I got that one already. But it is indeed good for a reference.

 

Thx guys for comments. This is so far the effect of the discussion.
I am not using IK. And a bit different approach, than Spore game.

 

How will you animate them?

 

For now I am not planning to do, for simplicity. It is a quite big task.
But the approach I could use to animate, is baking animation into texture and control bones on GPU side.
Other is using bones, calculate bones orientations/positions and send relevant data to GPU.

 

www.galaxykate.com

Galaxy Kate is the one who made spore and it's procedural generation. She's worth a reference.

Here she is giving a talk about procedural generation which includes some insights on how spore was designed.

 

Yeah, she has really good technical talk.
I know her presentation already.
But indeed, she is completely worth it to add here.
Specail thx for a galaxyKate link.