ALIEN renders every particle with light and color, and evolution and physics constantly produce new forms. This makes it a tool for living, moving artworks. This chapter collects the settings and techniques that matter for beautiful pictures and scenes.
The browser (Alt+B) contains a folder Artwork in the workspace Featured. Open the simulations there, look at how they are built and change them. Inspect their creatures with Alt+N and their genomes with Alt+F to learn how the shapes were grown.
The look of a world is controlled by the parameter group Visualization in the window Simulation parameters (Alt+4):
- Background color sets the color of empty space.
- Customization colors defines the palette of ten colors that all objects use. Changing a palette entry recolors every object of that color at once.
- Object coloring decides how objects are colored:
- Energy draws everything in grayscale.
- Customization uses the palette color of each object.
- Lineage + Customization keeps the palette color but shifts the hue slightly per lineage.
- Lineage and Creature give every lineage or every creature its own color.
- Glow controls the bloom effect that makes bright objects shine.
- Fluid illumination sets how strongly the cells light the fluids with hardware ray tracing.
- Light color, Light brightness and Light range of a radiation source let it shine with hardware ray tracing.
- Borderless rendering repeats the world periodically, which is useful for seamless patterns.
- Grid lines and Mark reference domain draw helper lines, which you usually switch off for pictures.
The brightness of an object follows its energy. Objects with little energy look dim, energetic objects bright. Use this deliberately: give a rock zones with different energies to shade it, or keep creatures at a higher energy so that they stand out. Connected solids appear as smooth surfaces with smooth outlines, so a rock shows its shading instead of its particles. The particles only become visible when you zoom in closely.
Tip: Dense fluids with high energy and high glow add up to a saturated white. For colorful liquids, use a low energy per particle, for example 10 to 15, a glow of at most 0.4 and an object distance of 1.2 or more.
On a GPU with ray tracing hardware, ALIEN automatically shows the creatures as living tissue under a microscope. Other GPUs show the normal view. Triangles and quadrangles of connected cells form translucent bodies with soft, slightly irregular outlines. The cells bulge gently out of these bodies. Connections without a polygon become thin strands, so chains of cells look like filaments. Only connected cells merge into one body. Cells without a connection stay apart, even when they touch.
Every cell shows wavy walls towards its neighbors and, zoomed in, a few small dark organelles. Each cell is also a neuron with a small body in its middle and a branched dendrite towards every cell it is connected to. The dendrites reach the walls, where they interweave with those of the neighbors. Body and dendrites become brighter in the color of the cell while signal #0 is positive or while the cell is attacked, and the body then shines with a soft halo. The glow follows the signal with a short delay, which keeps rapidly changing signals from flickering. These details stay with their cell while it moves. Zoomed out, every cell keeps its own color, so the cells of a body stay distinguishable. On a dark background the tissue is visible by its glow as in a fluorescence microscope. On a bright background it absorbs light as in a brightfield microscope and appears slightly embossed. When zoomed out, the tissue fades into the normal view, so that small structures keep their details and the brightness stays the same.
Fluids appear as a glowing nebula, while energy particles keep their normal look. Thin gas glows in saturated colors, dense gas shines towards warm white, and the edges of the clouds glow brighter. The cells light the nebula around them in their colors, as strongly as the simulation parameter Fluid illumination allows. Their light fades with the distance, and dense gas and creatures cast shadows. The glow of active neurons stays in the cells, so the nebula does not flicker. Glowing fluid particles shine as sparks.
The radiation sources shine from their areas. Their light illuminates the objects and fluids around them and appears as columns of light in a faint haze, while the objects on its way cast colored shadows. The shadows become softer the farther they fall. Within the area of a source, the light comes from all sides and casts no shadows. The parameters Light color, Light brightness and Light range of each radiation source set in which color, how bright and how far it shines.
Every frame is computed completely without random samples, so the image stays free of noise in motion and does not change when the simulation pauses. Pictures saved with Simulation > Save picture average several frames for smoother edges.
Layers can paint the background. A layer covers a circular or rectangular area, and its Background color tints this area when the color override of the layer is enabled. Layers fade out at their edges, so several overlapping layers blend into soft color fields.
A layer with a force field additionally darkens the background according to the height map of the field if Show force field is enabled. A Perlin noise field changes over time, so its background turns into slowly drifting clouds, even if the strength of the field is set to 0. This is an easy way to paint a living nebula behind a scene.
See Simulation parameters for all layer settings.
Genomes are the most powerful tool for art. A few techniques:
- Shapes. Every gene has a shape generator: Segment, Triangle, Rectangle, Hexagon, Tube, Large Lolli, Small Lolli and Zigzag. Hexagons and lollis make petals, discs and heads, segments make stems and tentacles.
- Branching. A constructor with several branches builds the same gene multiple times around a cell, up to six times. This creates stars and pinwheels.
- Concatenations. A constructor can build a gene several times in a row. Combined with a small angle at the first and last node, this produces curved stems and spirals.
- Recursion. A constructor that builds its own gene creates endless branching structures such as dendrites, lichen or fractal trees. Two such constructors at opposite angles give a tree. Add a constructor that builds a flower gene to grow blossoms at the tips.
- Free energy. Create seed with energy builds the first creature without energy cost, so even large structures appear without any energy supply. Recursive copies count as new creatures and need energy, for example from the external energy pool, which also limits how far the structure grows.
- Infinite age. Keep the Maximum age at infinity for art, so that grown structures do not fall apart.
The Genomes and construction chapter explains every constructor setting.
The expert setting Object color transition rules in the simulation parameters lets the colors of cells and free cells change over time. For each color you define a following color and a duration. Cycles of colors make creatures shimmer or let a scene pass through different moods. Fluids keep their colors.
- Simulation > Save picture renders the current view into an image file. You can choose a width and height larger than the screen for high resolution prints.
- View > Render UI (Alt+U) hides all windows, which gives a clean view for screen recordings.
- F7 switches to full screen.
- An AI agent can take screenshots through the MCP server and search for good camera positions.
- Fill a world with a sparse fluid in several colors and let a radial force field stir it into a galaxy.
- Grow a garden of fractal trees on rocks under a slowly drifting nebula.
- Convert a drawing with the image converter (Alt+Y) and let it crumble under gravity by lowering the Maximum force.
- Let an evolution experiment run for a day and color the creatures by lineage. The result is a living map of their history.