3D Cellular Automata

Posted by softologyblog on

I put together a new 4K resolution movie of some 3D Cellular Automata rules. All the parts were created in Visions of Chaos and rendered using the excellent Mitsuba renderer. The grids are up to 500x500x500 cells in size and the larger grids were over 25 million active cubes per frame.

I am always interested in new 3D CA rules, so if you do download Visions of Chaos and find any new rules let me know.

While I was browsing the archive section of Complex Systems I found some papers by Carter Bays here and here that discuss some “3D Game of Life” rules. Unfortunately they require special setups for the gliders to appear. I am more interested in finding rules that can lead to interesting behaviors from random starts (or from a smaller block of random cells). It is much more difficult (or at least it is for me) to find 3D CA rules that do not quickly die out or expand to fill the grid in a continuous random mess (and I have tried loads of random rules over the years).

Jason.

2 responses to “3D Cellular Automata”

  1. Hello dear Jason, I downloaded Renderman and Mitsuba, how to make them work in visions of Chaos.
    I can not integrate them.
    Can you help me?
    Thank you.

    Reply

    • Once you select the render engine there is an options button. Click that and point to the Misuba or RenderMan main exe path.

      This is for RenderMan
      http://softology.com.au/RenderMan/RenderMan.htm
      but the same principal applies for Mitsuba. Click Options and select the directory that you have installed Mitsuba into.

      After that Visions of Chaos will be able to use them for better shaded output.

      Reply

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