Random Generation Experiment

I wanted to try something with random motion and I created this little demo in just a few hours, mostly spent fiddling with parameters. In the end it appears to look sort of like dendrites. Actually... I just wanted to make a cool background for this blog xD But it turned into a cool experiment.

You can try it out yourself here (use "tab" to restart)









The "wires" start as 2 objects, producing a blueish trail. At a random moment, they spawn (or give birth) to 6 new identical objects, which then continue the process.

This used to exponentially slow down the computer as the number of them and trail poly count increased, so, in the latest version I've added "fertility loss", which means the objects have a limit at how many generations they can spawn before not being able to spawn new ones again. That brings me to an interesting concept of evolution, which is where I could lead the project in the future with some more generation-transmitting, or even mutating parameters. I've found that 2 generations until infertility is quite enough for this demo. Although it looks more impressive at 3 generations, the computer already can't handle it very well.

Strangely enough, if you do a search on neurons, you can notice 80% of the images use the same blue color.. Why? I guess "God said, let neurons be RGB(0, 220, 255)!"

The core of the code is practically 7 lines long, although this doesn't include camera rotation animation, fog, or the trail effects which were all done inside the Unity editor.

You can see the source code on my repository, or download the entire project and load it in Unity.

https://github.com/nothke/Dendrites_UnityProject

Comments

  1. Looks interesting - curious what the practical applications would be.

    By the way, I've sent you an email regarding some issues related to add-on authoring in Kerbal Space Program.

    ReplyDelete

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