Making Turtle Shapes

coreybrady · June 20, 2025, 7:59pm

I have felt that turtle shapes, and the turtle shapes editor were a limitation for some users, and so I have been exploring options. I found that I could get ChatGPT 4o to produce decent silhouettes of animals (view from above), and then I made a NetLogo model to allow me to create new shape specifications by tracing such outlines. Below are examples of some new shapes created by this method. I am happy to share the particular shapes and/or the NetLogo shape-creator model.

danielvartan · October 10, 2025, 8:42pm

That’s great @coreybrady! I’ve also been using ChatGPT to help with that.

There are a few tickets on the NetLogo code repository requesting better functionality in this area. Hopefully, the dev team will address them in the next release:

github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo

Turtle Shape Enhancements

opened 02:47PM - 11 Feb 21 UTC

brandesNW

low priority

There is no current plan or timetable for turtle shape enhancements. This issue… is a place to collect suggestions. - Change multiple parameters of existing 3d shapes - For example assign radius and height of a cylinder - Import 3d shapes from other sources - Would need to decide on supported file formats - Apply transformations to turtle shapes - For example a linear transformation applied to a standard cylinder could change its height to radius ratio - A linear transformation with negative coordinates could perform inversions, allowing the current effect of negative sizes in NetLogo3D in NetLogo. see [#211 ](https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo/issues/211) - Apply textures to the surface of a turtle - This idea requires more specification - Feasibility of this idea would be contingent on how turtle shapes are implemented.

ERSUCC · October 11, 2025, 7:36am

I expect SVG shapes to be supported in NetLogo 7.1, although there is no clear timeline for that release. I highly doubt that emojis will be directly supported, but there seem to be multiple resources online for converting emojis to SVG.

Isaac B.