ELEC6007 Final Report: Morphogenesis and Skin Pattern Generation for 3D Models

This report firstly examines how Morphogenesis can be interpreted through the use of computer modelling, concentrating on reaction-diffusion equations and how they can be used to simulate real-world animal skin patterns. The report then focuses on the work done by Greg Turk in his 1991 paper ”Generating Textures on Arbitrary Surfaces Using Reaction-Diffusion” [19]. The work accomplished in Turk’s paper is discussed; implementations based on his work in one, two and three dimensions are constructed and analysed for this report. This analysis compares the implementations’ results to both those achieved by Turk and real-world skin patterns. The analysis also attempts to determine how reactiondiffusion models proposed by Turk and others function, in particular, how changing parameters affects the patterns produced. The report concludes with a discussion of whether reaction-diffusion is an appropriate model for the natural phenomenon of animal skin pattern formation. Finally, further work is proposed to extend the current implementations, as these provide a solid basis to construct a generator for more complex reaction-diffusion models.