Polygonising Tom Lowe's 3D fractal automata

[NNenov]

Hi Guys,
I'm more a 3D artist than a programmer so this is a very naive question, but do any of you remember this program? https://sites.google.com/site/tomloweprojects/scale-symmetry/automataFinder
Someone (Joseph Parker) on twitter suggested I check it out and linked to Tom's thread about the software here: http://www.fractalforums.com/new-theories-and-research/3d-fractal-automata/?PHPSESSID=5e766323ba8f172ac22958d0250d083f

Its so fun to play about with this sort of software. I was just wondering if there is any way to interpret/process any of these variations to a format which can be read by poly based 3D software. I've had success opening most formats, most noteably marching cube format from Magica Voxel (.ply).
Is there any way or hope of converting the .es save files this program creates? I emailed Tom though I realise this was made a long time ago now..

I've also been playing around with Kevin Chapelier's Cellular Automata shader for use with Magica Voxel, which is great in the way it works together with the Magica Voxel editor and allows user interaction and rule type iteration. (some examples)

Anyway just some thoughts, getting to play with this software was a great treat.

[Tglad]

Hi NNenov,

 I'm glad you've enjoyed using this program. The .es files just encode the rule, so you need to run the rule on a seed, which is a 4x4x4 set of on/off voxels, which is done inside the program, and you can use different keyboard letters for different seeds. So the only way to convert a result to a polygon format is to take the code, which is here: https://github.com/TGlad/fractalAutomata3D, then load one of the .es files, and export the voxelisation, which would require adding some export code. Then the voxel file could be converted to polygons with marching cubes.
Unfortunately this will be difficult if you're not a programmer.

It would be great to write this program again with a fragment shader one day.

  Tom.

[NNenov]

Thanks for getting in touch, I see, thanks anyway!

[fractower]

If you are ready to try the walking cube algorithm Paul Bourke does a good job of explaining it. He also provides code examples.

http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/