Creature Grammar for Creative Modeling of 3D Monsters

Graphical Models (Special Issue of GMP’2014), 2014, 76(5): 376-389.

Xuekun Guo, Juncong Lin, Kai Xu and Xiaogang Jin

Given several regular shapes from different categories (with regular structure), our system can iteratively generate sets of monsters with abnormal structure as revealed by the inset on the right bottom side of each model.

Some monster examples designed with our system. For each session, we show the input shapes and randomly selected shapes from three generations and background sets.

Abstract

Monsters and strange creatures are frequently demanded in 3D games and movies. Modeling such kind of objects calls for creativity and imagination. Especially in a scenario where a large number of monsters with various shapes and styles are required, the designing and modeling process becomes even more challenging. We present a system to assist artists in the creative design of a large collection of various 3D monsters. Starting with a small set of shapes manually selected from different categories, our system iteratively generates sets of monster models serving as the artist’s reference and inspiration. The key component of our system is a so-called creature grammar, which is a shape grammar tailored for the generation of 3D monsters. Creature grammar governs the evolution from creatures with regular structures gradually into monsters with more and more abnormal structures through evolving the arrangement and number of shape parts, while preserving the semantics prescribed as prior knowledge. Experiments show that even starting with a small set of shapes from a few categories of common creatures (e.g., humanoids, bird-like creatures and quadrupeds), our system can produce a large set of unexpected monsters with both shape diversity and visual plausibility, thus providing great support for the user’s creative design.

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