Superfolia
Meanwhile, Evolution has been integrated into a bigger project called "Creatures", an experimental and self-organizing computer game funded by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund. The development team includes Frederik and Tom from NodeBox, myself and Nicolas Marinus. The project will deal with insects and plant-life.Superfolia illustrates some initial experiments with digital plants for Creatures. NodeBox has a library that handles SVG artwork, this means you can import vector files from Adobe Illustrator and manipulate them with programming code in NodeBox. That way it's easy to take some vector templates from Latifolia and then grow hundreds of thousands of organic-looking strands of hair on them.
When you would have to do this by hand it would probably take you down a lane of pain and misery. But with a software algorithm we can define one single piece of hair and give it some capabilities like "grow" or, more specifically, "grow in the direction your neighbors are growing", or "slowly wilt away if the environment around you is dying".
Then we can put a million of those hair-agents together in a social environment and see how they interact and evolve with each other. The hair is like an "emergent" organism with a set of simple tasks. A plant then is merely a collection of copied hairs that interact with each other according to those tasks.
