It’s been forever, but I thought I’d finally get back to posting online. In the last couple of years I’ve been interested in experimenting with 3D graphics. I feel like GPUs have become ubiqutous and graphics libraries have made working with them very accessible.
One of the things that got me going at first was coming across React Three Fiber. I’d been using React for years and this library fit into the workflow I’d gotten used to. Together with Vite, Eslint and Prettier I had all the tools to start learning. As an aside it’s a recurring theme for me to need a bunch of seemingly unrelated tools to be in place before I can do what I’m really after…And that was using ThreeJS.
Over the years one thing has become abundantly clear - I only learn by doing. There’s a mathematical game I’d come across when I was a kid called Conway’s Game of Life. I’ll save you the trouble of having to read the rules. Suffice it to say that given a couple of logical constraints you end up with a kind of evolving grid of cells. Usually the patterns of filled in cells on the grid is pretty random but sometimes you end up with shapes that resemble real life objects. I found some initial code that implements the rules on the Internet. Then I built the final project using ThreeJS.
If you click and hold the mouse then rotate you can see the grid in three dimensions. Not that it adds anything.
Finally, I thought it would be fun to make pendants shaped like a Game of Life pattern. So I made these two:
