Lightcubes, Game of Life

This is a preview of a project that is still to come:

  • Song: Sevish - Droplet
  • This was done in about 250 lines of Python that will be shared at a later date.

Making It Happen

Blender is really cool software. Using Cycles (the provided raytracing engine), you can create really, really cool effects. Especially if you have an eye for proper lighting and shaders. Transparency and Volumetric effects look especially good, the way they catch light is absolutely fabulous, and the fact that we can do this all in a simulation is amazing.

Future Plans For This Project

I plan on doing a lot more with this project. So far, this video took about 48 hours to render on my RTX 2060S. At this rate, one minute of video is equivalent to 36 days of render time. I have since gotten a 3080Ti and plan on using both GPUs for future renders. I can safely say I’ve got a pretty serious PC at this point.

I’d like to do 2+ minutes of video, with a full on demo and exploration into the different kinds of organisms that live within Conway’s game of life – there exists quite interesting phenomena. I think I can get the render time down to about 10 days per minute of video, especially after properly tuning my adaptive sampling settings. This video is unlisted and will be replaced by the complete project in a couple of months, which will be public on YouTube.

About John Conway

Sadly, John Conway died very recently in 2020 – he was really interesting to listen to in interviews.

Interestingly, he doesn’t see Game of Life as his greatest discovery, and wishes he was known for his other work!

“I don’t love it” - John Conway


Page Last Updated: 2022-10-17
Page Created: 2022-10-17