High Resolution Reaction-Diffusion Displacement

A geometric plane is displaced by a 2048x2048 pixel reaction-diffusion simulation (this is quite large compared to other sims I've done). The behavior is moving solitons that divide or become wavefronts when moving through areas where the history reagent is low. They avoid high-history areas (and tend to travel in the valleys). They can be killed by colliding with a wall of history reagent.
Simulated in Ready, rendered using SideFX Houdini with Mantra PBR.

[@pierreseaumaire6988]

Dan this is pure beauty

[@FinalMiro]

THAT'S AMAZING !!

[@pixelspring]

Just superb.

[@Testing-wm8fy]

Looks really cool. How did you shade the points that are leading the different parts? Did you use the velocity?

[@DanWills]

+Lewis-VFX there are actually no points/particles involved here, this is a regular houdini grid displaced and colored by an animated sequence of images that I exported from Ready. The things that look like particles are actually self-propagating 'solitons' in the simulation (kindof like an analogue of 'gliders' in game-of-life). To answer your question though, they are shaded with a graded version of the 'history trail' reagent from the simulation. That's the same image that is displacing their trails, but with some remapping so it doesn't glow all the way down the trail. I'd recommend grabbing a copy of 'Ready' and having a play with it - particularly some of the patterns in the 'Experiments' folder: github.com/GollyGang/ready

[@pavelperina7629]

Interesting. It reminds me slime mold organism or whatever it is (Physarum polycephalum) which somehow grows and branches when searching for food and "dries out" when it fails leaving only trails from food source to food source as some communication network.

[@DanWills]

Yeah I agree it's a little slime-mold-ish for sure and that gives me an interesting idea: Normally physarum simulations use explicitly-represented points (like 'particles' that move around) but it could probably also be done using a purely-raster approach by coupling the pheromone to a moving-solitons reaction-diffusion setup (indeed that sounds very similar to the 'history' reagent that the RD above implements.) One thing is that usually you get explicit control over stuff like sensing-distance/angle, and turning-rate too, which might be a little trickier to work out.. but it sounds like it'd be fun to play with and would be a cool addition to Ready I reckon! Cheers for the thought!

[@BenjaminRayner]

Hi Dan Just saw your talk on reaction diffusion that took me here!! Great Scott’s. Mad video’s

[@DanWills]

Thanks!

[@rendermanpro]

It is awesome!

[@FatFreakyBunny]

Awesome.

[@imnotnia]

Favorite

[@sheldondrake8935]

that got a physical gasp out of me; )

[@CorradoCarlevaro]

Awesome! How did you do that reaction? I saw something similar in Karl Sims page but I can't get anything similar in Ready (branching tips).Edit: Oops, I've just realized your are the author of some of the best patterns in Ready but still no branching tips :(

[@DanWills]

Corrado Carlevaro heya, good question Corrado! :) I'm afraid there's not a good answer I can give without really digging into the specific settings I ended up with. One hint might be that this is Gray-Scott with only a single extra history-regent added, not the more complex one with wave-reagents as well. I reckon there are examples of both of these types in the Ready patterns under Experiments/DanWills. Apart from that, it's just constant tweaking and exploration I guess ;) I've uploaded a Ready VTI file containing a lower-res sim using the same formula and settings that produced the video, which you can hopefully grab from here: drive.google.com/file/d/0B3gbVpOqrfLXUHdxMHp5S3loVDItQ1BIak1GeVlnMkE3bjZN (Edit: oops! wrong link before)

[@CorradoCarlevaro]

Grabbed the vti, got usual worms and spirals, just beyond my comprehension, thank you for your time

[@DanWills]

Corrado Carlevaro I had the link wrong before, but now it's right, give it a go again perhaps?

[@CorradoCarlevaro]

Yes! (still beyond my comprehension, but the right vti)

[@CorradoCarlevaro]

Wow, awesome

[@DonErikos]

excellent...(a little Ready tuto ? )

[@DenisTriton]

Впечатляет!

[@sheikafridabdaly8915]

can I render it on para view. I have been trying to export a simulation that I have created in ready and want to render it in para view .please inform me if it is possible and the process.

[@DanWills]

Yep there are several options here, assuming paraview can load image sequences. The simplest way would be to export the simulation as quantized 8-bit png image sequences directly from Ready (there's a menu item). Beyond that things get a bit harder, but depending what your VTI (Ready scene file) is like, there are possibilities for being able to load the sim into Houdini (to run natively in Dops via Gas OpenCL) and this can (even (in fact only) in the free 'apprentice' version of houdini) be cached at full precision (32bit float vdb or tiff or exr files, say) which should be much more accurate (if precision is an issue in your setup?). Worth noting, the Ready Houdini plug-in is currently being updated to work with Houdini 19.5 (which is python3-only!) I'm afraid without knowing anything about what you're trying to use it for, that's about all the advice I can give! :) Best of luck!

[@simongladman]

Stunning!

[@kuwertzel8938]

When it says high resolution but it's 2014. Great job though!