Evolving L-systems to generate virtual creatures

Virtual creatures play an increasingly important role in computer graphics as special effects and background characters. The artificial evolution of such creatures potentially offers some relief from the difficult and time consuming task of specifying morphologies and behaviors, But, while artificial life techniques have been used to create a variety of virtual creature, previous work has not scaled beyond creatures with 50 components and the most recent work has generated creatures that are unnatural looking. Here we describe a system that uses Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) as the encoding of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) for creating virtual creatures. Creatures evolved by this system have hundreds of parts, and the use of an L-system as the encoding results in creatures with a more natural look. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.