blobsAndSpikes

curios tessellation made by the spheres intersecting on the top layer

visualizing the rings of neighbors of a vertex on a mesh. More distant neighbors have a smaller sphere centered on them. this is going to be used in a new coral simulation im working on

just a little shape inspired by a doodle. I think these two are joining up.

Can’t help but play with fractals. Made using a script I wrote that runs in blender.

a family of bloops. 

Shark creature or spine. Not really sure where this is going, just playing around

Notice that all the branches maintain their distance from one-another. This is a nice result of using this diffusion-limited-aggregation-like method with the spheres; the structure blocks other parts of the structure from the jittering spheres, so it self-avoids. Of course, this 7branching structure could very easily be expressed with an l-system, but forcing an l-system to self-avoid and have all these organic curves would be a bit clunky. Perhaps I am just trading one type of clunky for another: The length of the first paragraph suggests the definition of such a structure requires a lot of code. Well it does, at the moment. But all of this is practice for create a neural-net like genetic code which takes in particle collisions and decides what to do (where to spawn a new node, die, etc.) Then I don’t have to write the growth rules; they get generated!

Today I learned how to animate growing structures in blender! The yellowish one is more reflective of how the growth simulation actually works: nodes (or vertices) keep getting added, and the line segments are between nodes. The rainbow one uses blender’s skin modifier with a subdivision surface modifier for smoothing. Both animations are constructed using the build modifier. The build modifier re-constructs the mesh according to the order in which elements were added, in this case by the script.

you are welcome to play with this project yourself!: https://github.com/jlopezbi/PlantGrower

Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011) Abandoning Objectives: Evolution Through the Search for Novelty Alone

Today I was mostly trying to figure out how to encode a ‘genetic language’ that can express a wide range of growth rules in PlantGrower. But that got tiresome so here is a shape discovered by making the particle size really small.

screen shots from today’s development of PlantGrower. Happy to see structures beginning to get more reminiscent of corals

first steps on a project to generate plant-like forms: https://github.com/jlopezbi/PlantGrower