LifeBrush is a VR Unreal Engine 4 toolkit for creating interactive biomolecular illustrative simulations. It combines interactive painting of molecular patterns in VR, with an agent-based modeling framework for defining molecular interactions and behaviours.

LifeBrush is fast. The generative brushes can synthesize thousands of molecules per second in volumes and on surfaces. The agent-based modeling framework is also fast, capable of simulating more than 10,000 agents at 90 fps in VR.

A user interacts with LifeBrush through a VR interface and the Unreal Engine Editor interface. In the VR interface, you paint agents in 3D space from an example-palette (it's like Tilt Brush, but for agents). In the Unreal Engine Editor interface, one configures the agents.

The C++ agent framework is based on an Entity-Component-System that we developed for Unreal Engine. Components are compact C++ structs. Entities organize multiple components into a single entity. We do not use Unreal's actor-component model because it cannot handle very large numbers of agents. Our ECS is the basis of our brush-based synthesis framework for painting agents and for simulating them.

This toolkit was orignally described in a conference paper in 2018, "LifeBrush: Painting interactive agent-based simulations" by Timothy Davison, Faramarz Samavati and Christian Jacob (the bibtex is below). The version here on GitHub is an evolution of that paper.

All code, unless stated otherwise, is Copyright (c) 2019, Timothy Davison. All rights reserved.

All of my code is released under a MIT license. There are included source-codes released under their respective licenses.

Please cite with:

@inproceedings{davison2018lifebrush,
  title={LifeBrush: Painting interactive agent-based simulations},
  author={Davison, Timothy and Samavati, Faramarz and Jacob, Christian},
  booktitle={2018 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW)},
  pages={17--24},
  year={2018},
  organization={IEEE}
}