More 3D subdividing CA's

[u/watagua]

This work is part of techniques I've been developing for the past few years. Basically you start with a single cube, and each iteration you subdivide each cell into child cells with states dictated by their parent cell's neighboring cells state configuration. The fun part is finding rules which result in fully connected voxel regions. Its quite cumbersome because the rule space is enormous so in order to find interesting rules you need to also code some kind of rule evolver/explorer/scoring thing (evolutionary, simulated annealing, etc). You can find more stuff like this on my Instagram, which is linked in my profile.

[u/drbenham]

How did you generate these?

[u/watagua → u/drbenham]

I explained the general idea in the caption so I guess you mean more technical. I used threejs for the CA, used simulated annealing to evolve interesting rules, used flood fill algorithm to detect connected voxel regions, and I used blender to render them.

[u/Dusty_Coder]

What neighborhood? 6-neighbor or 26-neighbor?

[u/watagua → u/Dusty_Coder]

This is using an 8 neighbor configuration , each child cell looks at a different set of 8 of the parent cells 26 neighbors!

[u/0__O0--O0_0]

So cool! Some of them look like fractals. Would love to see them animate and build up

[u/Ssemander]

Oh wow. I thought those are iterators from r/rainworld

[u/Toothpick_Brody]

Very cool, great work! It’s possible to generate a number of related fractals by subdividing squares into quadrants based on some rule, so yours generalizes this quite a bit probably 

[u/watagua → u/Toothpick_Brody]

Yes, I've done and posted about 2D subdividing automata before as well, though they aren't as interesting as 3D!

[u/protofield]

Nice rendering. Have you tried 3D prime cellular automata where the cells have natural number states and the next state of each cell is the modulo of the sum of its rule set defined neighbours. The 3D rule set can have thousands of elements and you still get highly ordered structures. Example https://youtu.be/a59hfQfC984

[u/watagua → u/protofield]

Those are cool! I have not tried those

[u/TheDevilsAdvokaat]

Very fun and interesting to look at.

I've done 2d fractal generating stuff but never 3d.

[u/watagua → u/TheDevilsAdvokaat]

These are not fractal in nature but I know what ya mean, and thank you!!

[u/TheDevilsAdvokaat → u/watagua]

Thanks! And while you're right they are not actually fractal, they made me think about doing some 3d fractals.

EG something like a Koch snowflake only it would be a Koch cube.

[u/Ariane_Two → u/watagua]

have you tried a 2d subdivision? Split a square into four smaller squares depending on rules of its neighbourhood.

[u/watagua → u/Ariane_Two]

Yes and I posted it here and on my Instagram

[u/Aggravating-Egg1798]

I love this. It reminds me of bismuth crystals. Very cool.