Reproducing virtual characters

Many virtual reality applications and games need a large number of virtual characters. Some of these applications require, in addition to the quantity, the simulation of kinship and evolution, not only of human character models, but also of different types of animals, toon models or other creatures. Some applications also require interactions between isolated populations with well-defined ethnic characteristics. The identification of similar traits between individuals of the same family is crucial to providing increased realism to many of these systems. The main difficulty in these situations is to generate models automatically, in real time, which are physically similar to a given population or family. In this paper, we extended our previous work, in which the reproduction of diploid beings is mimicked to produce character models that inherit genetic characteristics from their ancestors. Unlike morphing techniques, in our method, it is possible that a genetic characteristic from an ancestor be manifested only after a few generations. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.