#procgen toolkit

Fractals and Visual Effects

Fractals are amazing, but they’re not very flexible. They are, to make up some terms, brittle and rigid. Brittle, because a small tweak can have wide-ranging changes, making a particular look hard to adjust. And rigid, because it’s not obvious what change to make to push the results in the direction that you want. 

Which is why they don’t get used in films that often. “Hard to control” is bad enough. “Can’t make the shape you need” is a show-stopper.

Which is why this article about the visual effects of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is useful. The techniques they used to tame the fractals are great. Not just because they suggest ways that I can control fractals enough to use in my projects, but because they can be applied to other visual effects with similar problems.

Tools to explore the search space of an algorithmic output, photogrammetry applied to generated images, ways to integrate the generated output within a traditional pipeline: what these all have in common is that they can be applied to other generated things. Not just fractals.

Any generative but inflexible process can be tamed, which opens up a whole host of new applications for existing algorithms. Nesting tools within tools can make generative processes tractable.

The PCG Assistant - Danesh 

Mike Cook’s procedural generation tool has been released!

It’s not a generator, it’s a tool for analyzing generators. Any generator: just set some annotations in the code and it can take the output and settings of any generator function and show you the expressive range. You can track how changes you make to the generator affect the metrics of the output and collect a sample of the expressive range across a large randomized range of input parameters. 

This kind of tool lets us move from feeling our way around individual settings for a generator and gives us a high-level picture of the possible outputs. Often, the problem when making a new generator is maximizing the surprises while minimizing the broken outputs.

For live generators, where we’re sailing in unknown waters without a good map of the possible outcomes, we tend to stick close to shore--only implementing the algorithms that we know will work. Danesh and tools like it give us a map and a compass that we can use to plot our way across the ocean.

snek

I like it when artists talk about their process, but Anders Hoff (writing under the name Inconvergent) has gone a step further and released a toolkit, named “snek”. It’s a generative programming system implemented in Common Lisp that composes changes in encapsulated objects (called alterations) that lets Inconvergent build generative processes without having to worry about managing the intermediate state.

It reminds me a bit of parametric geometric operations (such as the CAD-inspired ones used by Tweet 2 Form) and a little bit of Quil’s functional take on Processing, but snek is very much its own thing too. I look forward to seeing what Inconvergent builds with it.

http://inconvergent.net/snek-is-not-an-acronym/

http://inconvergent.net/a-barrel-of-bots/

openFrameworks 

“openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding.”

It’s open source and community-developed, and the 0.9.0 version added the ability to display in your browser. It’s been used on some pretty neat projects, too: projection mapping, art installations, music visualizers, 3d printed dress folding, video games...

TOWN - Tiny prOcedural World geNerator

Continuing the theme of procedural generation examples in Unity, here’s a student project that combines four different generation processes to create a village. The generators are available in a Unity project if you want to play with the generator and see how it looks in action. 

The generator was originally created as a student project to explore some of the different ways that procedural content generation is used. The research writeup that accompanies the project is interesting in itself, especially if you’re looking for inspiration or ideas for your next procgen project.

ProceduralToolkit

Originally created for the last ProcJam, the ProceduralToolkit is a collection of open-source tools for procedural generatiion in Unity. Available on GitHub or the Unity Asset Store, it includes quite a few examples of how to use it, including a chair generator, a building generator, and a terrain generator.

So you think Libnoise sounds like a great idea, but you’re using Unity, and Unity uses C# instead? No problem: Libnoise has been ported to Unity. 

From the ProcJam 2014 site, this collection of tutorials is a good introduction to getting started with procedural generation.