Spaceship Generator

Sadly it doesn&#x27;t seem to generate UVs for the models. But using the cube projection in Blender seems to do an OK job.<p>Add a skybox and a couple of simple particle effects in PlayCanvas.<p>And we have some WebGL spaceships :-)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playcanv.as&#x2F;p&#x2F;kZtPZpnH&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playcanv.as&#x2F;p&#x2F;kZtPZpnH&#x2F;</a>

I love that the ships look more like &quot;skyscrapers in space&quot; then airplane like spaceships we usually see in tv shows&#x2F;movies.<p>This is most likely (according to multiple hard scifi authors) a much more realistic depiction of how spaceships are going to look like.<p>Example given: The Expanse - &quot;Flip and Burn&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ</a>

I saw the headline and initially assumed it would be some droll Game of Life invention. Then I thought, no, maybe its some automatic sci-fi art generation script. And I was rewarded!<p>Procedural generation like this is quite possibly key to the future of indie games- if you don&#x27;t have the team to design large sets of art assets, its important to be able to put <i>something</i> pretty out there using your own wit. (A good example would be No Man&#x27;s Sky.)

I don&#x27;t really like most procedural generation. It has no meaning and the results are not intellectually stimulating. At best you can&#x27;t spot the pattern and parameters but you usually can after a few examples.<p>An idea I am more interested in is that you generate requirements and use an optimiser to solve the actual design. This way, there is a hidden &quot;why&quot;. With some study, a human might be able to discern why x is so thick or why A is attached to B. When a design has a use in mind then it has meaning.

I find the arguments of procedural vs artistic content somewhat humorous given that artistic content is just an attempt to create something that is a fascimile of actual natural and human generated artifacts. The natural world is by definition procedural (unless you believe in a Creator). The human artifacts have some artistry - but only in the broad strokes. Most buildings, and most details of architected buildings, follow a procedural semantic. The natural decay of human artifacts follow a procedural semantic.<p>I assume that in the near future of VR that few will play &quot;AAA games&quot; (and hence few will exist) because they won&#x27;t be able to complete with free procedurally generated environments.

I find Blender quite handy when it comes to (randomized&#x2F;parameterized) generation of 3D objects for the purpose of rendering, although I&#x27;ve only done really simple things. However the API, while in Python (which is good), feels very unpythonic and clumsy, all while being severely under-documented. It would be really nice if the API could be cleaned up in a future major release...

Cool, but the ships are all rather samey. They all spring from the root hull, with a main body being longer than it is wide. Perhaps that is needed to conform with our terrestrial concept of &quot;ship&quot;. But I think it could be improved by randomizing the number or shape of starting hulls. It would also be interesting to see what could be done by extruding spherical shapes rather than boxes.

Very cute, although the ships look samish (would probably be interesting to start with different base templates etc.<p>Still, it&#x27;s only a few steps away from &quot;random British 1970s SF book cover&quot;.

The selected examples got me thinking: Those eight are presumably examples the author felt turned out particularly well. Could one build a neural network trained on generated ships that &quot;turned out well&quot; to automatically generate better-looking random ships?<p>Could this sort of process be used in games where procedural generation might otherwise be rejected because it looks &quot;too random&quot;?

The extreme examples remind me so much of the Shivan ships in the Freespace series.<p>I don&#x27;t think the script replaces a professional designer, but this is awesome for brainstorming ship ideas.

My physics knowledge is pretty weak. Wouldn&#x27;t you want a space ship to be closer to something like an oblate spheroid? Less surface area &lt;-&gt; volume ratio builds cheaper, lighter space ships presumably? The primary thing I&#x27;m unsure of is steering, but how much of a problem can that be?

Something to do this in Lego Digital Designer would get <i>considerable</i> interest.

Great work! I love a lot of the ships you show. I&#x27;ll have to look at the code next weekend. I liked the city-building scripts from years ago in Blender too. Fun stuff to create a ton of assets automatically.<p>I was working on a procedural art generator in Blender in 2006, and I tried to use genetic programming written in Lisp to create random parameters into a fixed generator I had written in Python copied from a parametric formula renderer. I can&#x27;t remember the original author. I couldn&#x27;t get it to work well, and got sucked into Processing shortly thereafter, and other things Blender.<p>You could meld your script with a Genetic Program to present quick renders it evolves, and use Neural Nets to drive towards what you like, and away from what you don&#x27;t to evolve a design. This cuts the search space, and thus the time, down from a simply random form generator in producing images you may want.<p>You&#x27;ve killed my next weekend!<p>Again, great work!

Form follows function! No wait... I think I have it backwards

Awesome stuff. Would love to see concept artists incorporating procedural generated assets in their workflow. Produce 100 samples like this, teach the computer which ones they prefer, produce 100 more, take a few and refine them by hand.

When I tried to run it, I got:<p>Traceback (most recent call last): File &quot;&#x2F;spaceship_generator.py&quot;, line 737, in &lt;module&gt; File &quot;&#x2F;spaceship_generator.py&quot;, line 711, in generate_spaceship AttributeError: &#x27;BevelModifier&#x27; object has no attribute &#x27;offset_type&#x27;<p>I ran it with Blender 2.69

Very macross of you.

Dawkins wrote the biomorph software to demonstrate evolution, you got to select squiggles and breed them.<p>What would be call is to evolve spaceships by selective breeding.<p>No doubt this being The Internet this was done by a Russian seven years ago, and I failed to GTFA.

Has anyone 3D printed one of these models?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shapeways.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;prepping_blender_files_for_3d_printing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shapeways.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;prepping_blender_files_fo...</a>

Thing is, &#x2F;r&#x2F;proceduralgeneration is running a monthly challenge for exactly this right now but I haven&#x27;t seen it listed as entry yet. Check out the previous entries, some of them are neat (others less so).

I&#x27;m delighted by how little code this is!

Someone should be working on spaceship guidance software with UI interfaces for humans. We&#x27;re going to need it.

This … this is awesome. Thanks for sharing!

If this works as &quot;advertised&quot; then this is amazing. I&#x27;d love to see a game implement this.

For a second I had to look if this was from the &quot;limit theory&quot; guy but no, RIP LT.

Awesome work! Now I need website where I can just generate them and view them in webgl.

Oh wow - I can procedurally generate 3D models ?!!! Blender tutorial needed :-)

I&#x27;m guessing not the algorithm used to create the Destiny.

Why are there windows on a spaceship?

This is very impressive. Nice work.

Could you do procedural cars?

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stellarismods.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;spaceships&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stellarismods.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;spaceships&#x2F;</a>

There is an error in script.<p>seed = &#x27;tweer&#x27; obj = generate_spaceship(seed)<p>Python can&#x27;t redefine functions as variables. Seed is a function.

&gt; Start with a box.<p>And end with some boxes stuck together.