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Conway’s Game of Life is a type of cellular automation, it shows that complexity can arise from a simple set of rules. The introduction in the animation explains how it works.
I tried several ways to create this animation. Firstly I tried keyframing individual cubes to show/hide, using a python script. This prooved ineffective because there can be many thousands of cubes, and blender would take forever to load them in. I also tried merging all the cubes needed into one object, then assigning a colour/ transparency material to each cube vertex where appropriate, but again blender did not like thousands of materials.
I had already implemented game of life in C++ using the OpenCV library for image processing. So the final solution was to create a single object of 500x500 cubes in blender, then create a texture for the entire cube array in c++. I then set the texture node to ‘image sequence’, which would automatically update the texture for each frame.
