RenderBots—Multi‐Agent Systems for Direct Image Generation

Abstract

The term stroke-based rendering collectively describes techniques where images are generated from elements that are usually larger than a pixel. These techniques lend themselves well for rendering artistic styles such as stippling and hatching. This paper presents a novel approach for stroke-based rendering that exploits multi-agent systems. RenderBots are individual agents each of which in general represents one stroke. They form a multi-agent system and undergo a simulation to distribute themselves in the environment. The environment consists of a source image and possibly additional G-buffers. The final image is created when the simulation is finished by having eachRenderBot execute its painting function. RenderBot classes differ in their physical behavior as well as their way of painting so that different styles can be created in a very flexible way.

Swarmic autopoiesis and computational creativity

“…Other classes of research by (Curtis, 1998;Schlechtweg et al, 2005) are based on reworking an initial drawing. There is a significant number of related papers in the area of non-photorealistic rendering; particularly, many papers approach drawing and painting using an optimisation framework.…”

“…Among the many works in the field of generative art are research on swarm painting (Aupetit, Bordeau, Monmarche, Slimane, and Venturini, 2004;Moura and Ramos, 2007;Urbano, 2005Urbano, , 2006, which includes, ant colony paintings (Greenfield, 2005;Monmarche, Aupetit, Bordeau, Slimane, and Venturini, 2003;Semet, O'Reilly, and Durand, 2004) and other multi-agent systems, including RenderBots (Schlechtweg, Germer, and Strothotte, 2005) as well as the particle-based non-evolutionary approach of Loose and Sketchy Animation (Curtis, 1998).…”

A Novel Artificial Mosaic Generation Technique Driven by Local Gradient Analysis

“…The authors, using graph-cut optimization algorithm, are able to work on tiles positioning without an explicit edge detection phase. Other related works can be found in [5,6,7]. A complete survey of the existing methods in the field of artificial mosaic is available in [8].…”

The Orthant Neighborhood Graph: A Decentralized Spatial Data Structure for Dynamic Point Sets

“…One example are particle systems, where individual particles can be considered as points moving through space [1]. A more complex example are multi-agent systems, where each object has some complex behavior [2]. A common task in these systems is to find all neighbors in a defined neighborhood or the nearest neighbor for a particle or agent.…”

“…We restrict our treatment of related work to the most established techniques used in computer graphics. Uniform space subdivision: A simple way to speed up proximity queries [2] or collision detection [3] is to divide the space into equally sized buckets where the objects are stored. Objects within a given range are found by considering only the intersected grid cells.…”