Neat particles Design, representation, and animation of particle system effects.pdf

NEAT Particles: Design, Representation, and Animation of Particle System Effects Erin Hastings, Ratan Guha, and Kenneth O. Stanley School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816 {hastings, guha, kstanley}@ In Proceedings of the IEEE 2007 Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG’07). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Abstract— Particle systems are a representation, computation, for real-time games and simulations; in the future it will and rendering method for special effects such as fire, smoke, be extended other applications as well. NEAT Particles can explosions, electricity, water, magic, and many other phenomena. evolve behavior such as the wizard’s spell without the need This paper presents NEAT Particles, a new design, represen- tation, and animation method for particle systems tailored to for knowledge of physics or programming. NEAT Particles real-time effects in video games and simulations. In NEAT is a step toward the long-term goal of automated graphics Particles, the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) content generation for games, simulations, and movies. method evolves artificial neural networks (ANN) that control the appearance and motion of particles. NEAT Particles affords three II. BACKGROUND primary advantages over traditional particle effect development methods. First, it decouples the creation of new particle effects This section reviews particle systems, IEC, and NEAT, from mathematics and programming, enabling users with littl