Joe Chip offers up a great little plugin for Autodesk Maya called GENR8, (which is a surface design tool developed by Martin Hemburg, see below) which allows you to create and affect objects using generative processes. Pretty cool, and free… check it out!
“Genr8 is a surface design tool developed by Martin Hemberg with advisory services provided by Una-May O’Reilly and Peter Testa. The concepts and tool are part of the work by the Emergent Design Group at MIT. The goal was to provide architects with access to creative surface design by giving them influence over generative processes. A generative process is the activity of iteratively executing some encoding that creates and then modifies an artifact. In the generative process we chose, what was most intriguing and of use to architects is a model of cellular growth interacting with an environment.”
Embedded youtube vids are broken