This Alien Doesn’t Exist - Devlog #6

Rendering improvements… and a lot of weird aliens

This time and more was mostly spent improving the renderer and cleaning up the procedural generation pipeline. It wasn’t the biggest update feature-wise, but it changed a lot behind the scenes.

Skin generation got a complete overhaul. Instead of the old flat patterns, aliens now use layered procedural noise to generate stripes, spots, scales, mottling, and other textures that blend between colours in each creature’s palette. Some of the results look much more organic than before, and every seed feels a little more unique.

Lighting was also improved with a small fill light and softer head illumination to give the creatures a bit more depth while keeping the renderer entirely CPU-based.

Under the hood

Most of the work happened inside the generation pipeline.

Some of the changes include:

Refactoring the rendering code
Cleaning up URL routing and history handling
Moving material and pattern logic into dedicated systems
Removing old experimental code
Simplifying parts of the generation pipeline

The project is much easier to work on now than it was some time ago.

The problems I’m running into

As the generator gets more complex, the weird edge cases become much more obvious.

Some creatures still end up way too large and spill off the canvas. Others become extremely tall or paper thin because several generated traits multiply together in unexpected ways.

Eye placement is another big issue. The generator creates proper eye sockets, but the eyes themselves don’t always end up inside those sockets, so some aliens end up looking like they’re staring from somewhere completely different.

Anatomy is also still very disconnected. Heads, limbs, tails, and bodies are generated mostly independently, which sometimes produces creatures that technically make sense but don’t really feel believable. Fixing that means making the different body parts influence each other instead of each system making decisions on its own.

Those are probably the biggest blockers before I start working on animation.

Next up I’ll be focusing on making the anatomy feel much more coherent, fixing eye placement, improving creature proportions, and stopping the generator from producing those wonderfully cursed aliens that somehow escape the canvas.