Monday, May 29, 2006

3D Biomorphs

As some of you may probably know, I am very interested in Biomorphs since the design of the Lifedrop virtual ecosystem (see the LifeDrop page on the right). In LifeDrop, the virtual water drop is like a 3D sphere with simple physical simulation. Biomorphs are true autonomous agents and their 3D shapes are based on the original Richard Dawkins recursive procedure simply called Tree in the Blind Watchmaker program. Concerning the 3D rendering, I have just made a small adaption to this original 2D routine in order to have some "legs" in 3D. However, I am not very satisfied by this approach. I would be very interested if someone has already found a better way for drawing 3D Biomorphs. The problem is that procedure not only needs to show the same properties as in 2D, but also a much better rendering. As an example of a better rendering in 2D, the image shows "Mandelbrotset Biomorph" which has been computed using Mathematica (see http://www.bugman123.com/Fractals/Fractals.html for details). However, since LifeDrop runs multiple Biomorphs agents in parallel, the drawing procedure must be optimized to obtain fast rendering. All theses points make the problem hard to solve. However, I think it is possible and when this point will be resolved, I will update LifeDrop.