GENR8 - A Design Tool for Surface Generation

GENR8 is an architect’s design tool that generates surfaces. It is powerful and innovative because it fuses expressively powerful universes of growth languages with evolutionary search. Developed via the API of Alias|Wavefront’s Maya, it combines 3D map L-systems, that are extended to an abstract physical environment, with Grammatical Evolution. GENR8 addresses key issues arising from exploiting evolutionary adaption within a creative interactive tool framework. EAs typically adapt ‘off-line’ but GENR8 is designed to sensitively accommodate the nature of the back and forth control exchange between user and tool during on-line evolutionary adaptation. It addresses how users may interrupt, intervene and then resume an EA tool. It also forgoes interactive subjective design evaluation for computationalized multi-criteria evaluation that permits wider search in shorter time spans.