A short game-jam-like-project to create a procedural animation of cell meiosis using Unity3D
DISCLAIMER: This code is more about Unity and procedural animation than about biology - please don't rely on this to learn about cell meioisis, and more importantly if you are an actual cell, or made of cells, absolutely to not use this as a reproduction guide book. Your children will not thank you.
Original constraints
- Needs to be done in 10-12 hours
- Should not include any paid assets or proprietary code
- The core loop or flow should be understandable to a non-coder
- Flow should closely follow the whiteboard plan (see end)
You can see a video of the program running (with me controlling the janky camera) here. You can also find the Windows exeutable version on itch.io
Code Architecture
- The main cell has a Finite State Machine (FSM) which is based upon some course work from Jason Weimann
- Within each state (set up in OnEnter), we sequence a number of events like the cell growing, based upon a timer
- To see a good OnEnter example, look at Phase1_Interphase
- At the end of each phase (in OnExit) we clear all timers from the state machine ready for the next phase.
- Cells internally have a counter for what generation they are, so they know if they're in Cycle I or Cycle II
Other Notes
I set out to use this as a learning opportunity but time was too short to write much great code. The main new thing for me was the mesh deformation needed to divide a cell. I had seen a few tutorials and videos but never really tried it; it turned out to be much easier than I thought and only required one short script. That is also available in a separate repo: unity mesh deformation demo
The Whiteboard
