Animated GoL

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
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01rich01
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Animated GoL

Post by 01rich01 » August 5th, 2013, 7:27 pm

Hello! I though I would share my latest project with you here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLzmNNvkZFo

I used C++ to read Golly patterns, then created images using the OpenCV library. The animation was done with the open source software 'Blender'.

Enjoy,
Rich

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MattA
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Re: Animated GoL

Post by MattA » February 2nd, 2014, 3:16 am

I really enjoyed that video. Good music to go with it, too. How were the colors of the cells assigned?

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dvgrn
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Re: Animated GoL

Post by dvgrn » February 3rd, 2014, 11:22 am

MattA wrote:I really enjoyed that video. Good music to go with it, too. How were the colors of the cells assigned?
Yes, there are some very nice effects here. I've been thinking for many years that for large patterns, a flyover with the viewpoint at an angle to the Life plane would be much more interesting to look at than a top-down view -- and I'd say this video proves the point very well...!

I started speculating about Life visualizations sometime before Golly 1.0 came out, when the limitations of Golly's viewport became apparent. Thanks to a combination of practicality, cross-platform graphics headaches, and Hashlife compatibility, it seems likely that Golly won't start supporting arbitrary viewing angles any time soon, and even the zooms will be stuck at simple power-of-two jumps rather than anything smoother.

So I've been very interested to see how Chris Rowett's scriptable LifeView project is developing. But so far, LifeView doesn't quite do arbitrary camera angles, though there are other impressive effects.

Here's something I was testing out in 2006 -- an attempt to showcase the variety of Life objects that have been discovered over the last forty years, in a simple kind of flyover. There are literally hundreds of thousands of moving and oscillating Life patterns available, to say nothing of the still lifes, that could be dropped into a Life universe for a flyover. Maybe this will give someone an idea for a new Blender project --

EDIT: If anyone wants to try out the old flyover script -- as it's currently written, if you decompress the flyover ZIP archive into Golly's Scripts/Python folder, you can just hit Enter when the display-folder question comes up.

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dvgrn
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Re: Animated GoL

Post by dvgrn » February 3rd, 2014, 12:06 pm

MattA wrote:How were the colors of the cells assigned?
See the YouTube comments on the video. Looks like at least for some of the sequences, a new cell is bright white, and darker colors are assigned as the cell ages.

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