I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object. The script is written in Python and runs within the Golly cellular automata simulator. Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices in a text file that can be opened in Blender, an open source 3D graphics program. Because the script inefficiently renders every individual cube into a text file, I’m currently unable to render objects that are much larger or more complex than the images below. Optimizations to the script like combining faces, eliminating hidden faces, and switching to a binary vector file format should eventually reduce this problem. Download the script here. To use the script, you’ll need Python, Golly, and Blender. Run Golly, load or draw your starting pattern, then choose Run Script in the File menu and find my script. Enter the number of layers to render; initially try around 10 for large patterns, 100 for small patterns. The script will create a file called 3dlife.raw which you can import into Blender with File->Import->Raw Faces. On my computer, Blender will struggle or crash if the raw file is much more than 150MB. examples rendered with LuxRender:



