| Introduction | Previous Works | Implementation/Results | Conclusion | Impressum | References |
Conclusion:
It was a good experience to deepen our knowledge in artificial evolution in a practical way and get in touch with the real development of virtual creatures. It brought us the theory heard in class much closer and we really enjoyed working with MorphEngine.
While designing and evolving the creatures we encountered problems we never thought of and we got some experience on the importance of decisions a designer must take.
It was also very interesting how the creatures changed their behaviour depending on very small changes in the input parameters.
We were surprised that it took us so long to design and especially to evolve creatures with the desired behaviour. Sometimes it was really frustrating that the creature didn’t show the desired behaviour after having evolved it for thousand generations.
To sum it we are satisfied with the achieved results. Of course, in such projects, there is always room to evolve more creatures or to enhance the page design.
Tips and Tricks working with MeCreator:
Working with MeCreator wasn’t as easy as we first thought, mainly because the tool is not as enhanced as other 3-D tools we knew e.g. the function “undo” does not exist.
General:
The value of the fitness function is the actual z value of the creature. To create balanced creatures it’s useful to build one part of the body and then duplicate and rotate it grouped.
If the creature doesn’t show the desired behaviour, playing around with the motor speed and motor force values might help. We often only had to change these values and the creature behaved as desired.
Rotation:
If you intend to rotate objects around the origin, create a dummy object to rotate your object around. Select the object you want to rotate and the dummy one at last and use the menu bar(‘edit>translate object>rotate/move/scale’) to rotate it.Hinge Joints:
Always use the menu bar ‘display>render all joints’ to see how changes affect the joint normals.