A primer on procedural character generation for games and real-time applications

Abstract

Several of the hurdles in meaningful procedural generation are exacerbated when it comes to characters, especially when they are at the very center of the stage. Ontogenetic approaches (i.e., that try to mimic the desired result, instead of generating it by simulating natural processes) are usually the best fit for most applications, usually involving altering a base character and/or combining sets of modular parts. This is, however, still a design, art and engineering challenge. This chapter covers procedural character generation, while pointing at character design fundamentals that should be kept in mind when designing these systems. Starting by reviewing state-of-the-art techniques from games that have them as a main feature, it then covers mesh generation, altering existing meshes and scaling bones to generate diverse silhouettes. It also proposes a technique for 3D mesh combination that involves offline tagging of vertices in edges to create seamless joints between modules at runtime. Finally, it covers texture generation and combining texture channels in ways that allow even more varied characters.