Artificial Life Techniques for Generating Controllers for Physically Modelled Characters

The realistic physical modelling of characters in games and virtual worlds is becoming a viable alternative to more traditional animation techniques. Physical modelling can enhance realism and allow users to interact with the world much more freely. However, designing controllers to move physically modelled characters (e.g. to make a human character walk) is generally a difficult task. Artificial life techniques can be useful in automating this task. For example, artificial evolution can generate suitable controllers for simple behaviours, given only a high level description of that behaviour in terms of a fitness function. In this paper, the state of the art in evolving controllers, and also in evolving the characters’ body shapes, is described. It is then suggested that current approaches will not be able to scale up to more complicated behaviours. A number of possible solutions to this problem are described. Finally, several routes for delivering this technology to the games industry are discussed.