Welcome to Fractal Forums

I have made a 3d version of my fractal automata finder, it is available next to the download for the 2d automata finder (which is at this page: https://sites.google.com/site/tomloweprojects/scale-symmetry/automataFinder), click the down arrow at the bottom right of the page to download 3DFractalAutomata.

No moving ones yet actually, but plenty of stationary ones, here are a couple of screenshots-

Oh, awesome stuff :D

If you get a V7 equivalent going with those, maybe you get something like houses?
Because lots of the V7 results looked like nice house layouts...

Can you add cutting planes to reveal the inside structure of some of those more cuboid ones?

I still would stand for a colours. Maybe just gradient, how it developed.

Thanks for the suggestions, kram, I'll add cutting planes to the todo, you can already see it sometimes in the big objects, they hit the front pane and you can see their insides.
Asdam, I could put in colours when I get time to make a GUI for it. I'm not sure how to colour, a lot of the results are like rocks and sponges like the pictures below, so only subtle colouring would seem appropriate, and you can get some from the colour of lights.

(what the hell, is there an april fool's thing happening? Either way...)

Nice! I'd actually like to see what physical properties such structures have if printed in Shapeways or alike...

Thanks Kram.
The moving version is coming along ok, the main challenge is getting it fast enough to use, seven 256³ arrays all updating at once is quite heavy, so I'm thinking of adding threading so it can make use of multiple cores. I don't want to get into GPU coding though.
Here's another random example, some of them look a bit like crystals, feel free anyone to try it out.

Looks somewhat similar to my Mixpinski4 plus a bit of "randomness" cool. :beer:

Really awesome! I featured them here:
http://algorithmic-worlds.net/blog/blog.php?Post=20120406

Best,

Sam

I wonder, since you'll use the smaller grids aswell...
Do you think, it would be more efficient to cleverly embed the lower resolutions into one big grid instead of having multiple smaller and smaller ones?
I'm really not sure... Just a random idea.

Moving stuff? yay :) How does it work now?

Hey thanks Sam! I'm delighted that this is featured in your blog.
Thanks for the idea Kram, that could help, certainly different memory layouts can make a difference. I'm using the lower res grids for early culling on the static ones.

The moving automata are in now and in the link giving in the first post. I have also added a small summary on that page.
Unfortunately I had to half the resolution to keep the frame rate decent. It would probably run faster on a fragment shader but that isn't a certainty. If you have a beefy computer and it is running too fast then let me know and I can put in a higher resolution option.

At the moment the best dynamic type seems to be type 6.

Do you think you could do variable resolutions? It should be fairly easy to basically procedurally generate higher resolution levels... at least I expect it to be. It's all the same but bigger, right?

If you mean varying the resolution to fit to a frame rate then that isn't feasible, the jumps are too big, when you double the resolution it takes at least 8 times the CPU time and memory. But I could put in a hi res mode, if anyone has a computer beefy enough to need it.

The new version lets you try out a few different seed shapes for a particular rule. The pictures below show a type 3 rule with an O as a seed, a C and the normal random seed. You press 'o', 'c' or 'r', its in the info. The 'o' seed gives a big variety of kind of snowflake type shapes, they're not all a perfect O like the one below.

I didn't mean dynamic, no. Just set it once and the go with it or restart from scratch if you want a different resolution.
Those o/c/r are an awesome idea :D
What about I or .? Those seem reasonable "further steps"

There is already a . and Z and X, its in the info in the command window when you run it.

I have updated to include a type 5 and type 6 static. These are quite nice in that they more or less cover the set of simple neighbourhoods.

Here's a type 6-

Update:
- Type 1 changed to a better rule set
- New types 7,8 and 9 are asymmetric in the vertical axis, so perhaps more appropriate for earth features which have gravity
- New option: 'g' side on view of a random 4x4x2 voxel terrain.
- New option: 'h' top down view of a random 4x4x2 voxel terrain.

So for example, arid.es9 looks like this from above and this from the side:

And here is trees2.es9 from the top and from the side.
These examples are in the zip file, on the original link.

Once you have found nice rules, they can be put into a level with perspective. The levels-of-detail let you deal with objects close up and far away. Here I have applied the 'arid' rule to a course grid of hills with tree shapes on them:

Same level with the trees rule applied. Notice that normals and shadows aren't enough to get a good 3d feel, probably ambient occlusion would be needed:

And lastly, the course grid that they are based on, which is user-built:

Nice stuff that gave me an idea:
Since voxelized Mandelbulbs are readily available, you could try to use one of those as a base. :)