None of this looks "photorealistic". The creatures look hilarious and the paper is not well written either.
"Each part generator is either a transpiled node-graph,
or a non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS). NURBS
parameter-space is high-dimensional, so we randomize
NURBS parameters under a factorization inspired by lofting,
composed of deviations from a center curve. To tune the
random distribution, we modelled 30 example heads and
bodies, and ensured that our distribution supports them."
This strikes me as a fairly random approach. No wonder why those creatures look the way they do. I fail to see why this is worth a scientific paper as it appears to be no more than a student project with a number of contributors across different fields. Building a (somewhat) procedually based asset library has been done countless times before by game dev studios big and small.
Spore, No Man’s Sky, Elite Dangerous all do galaxy generation to good effect. Elite is probably the most realistic. No Man’s Sky has creatures like Spore.
"Each part generator is either a transpiled node-graph, or a non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS). NURBS parameter-space is high-dimensional, so we randomize NURBS parameters under a factorization inspired by lofting, composed of deviations from a center curve. To tune the random distribution, we modelled 30 example heads and bodies, and ensured that our distribution supports them."
This strikes me as a fairly random approach. No wonder why those creatures look the way they do. I fail to see why this is worth a scientific paper as it appears to be no more than a student project with a number of contributors across different fields. Building a (somewhat) procedually based asset library has been done countless times before by game dev studios big and small.