Oct 7, 2026, 8:14 PMRE: https://abraum.social/@nr4/117344454841116676
I remember creating physarium sims for my architecture students back in 2013 and then only managed to run a few thousand agents in realtime (in Java/Processing). Even that was super exciting. Now people are able to casually throw around four million of them (and in < 8KB, incl. music)...
Lovely stuff and I like the use of density/pattern masks/gradients to create these multi-scale aesthetics. Beautiful! 🤩👏
Oct 8, 2026, 6:02 AM@toxi thanks, glad you enjoyed my little party trick! :)
I think with today's high-end GFX cards, an additional factor 100 in agent number is totally possible. But I went for a more conservative number to enable more people to watch it in real-time on their own hardware.
Oct 8, 2026, 8:33 AM@nr4 Sure thing! I think you did the right call there and I doubt using 100x more would have meaningfully/aesthetically added something drastic... But the sheer compute power available on current GPUs is still mindboggling to me sometimes...
One thing we did in my workshops back then was to record the agent traces as grayscale image over N frames, then slowly interpolate the parameters towards a target config and rerun the sim, rinse and repeat... We then loaded the images into a voxel volume and extracted a surface mesh for 3D printing... Very similar approach to my Type&Form project (only there I used reaction diffusion):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/albums/72157604724789091/
Oct 8, 2026, 8:46 AM@toxi wow, the 3D printed results look really awesome. Great idea with the voxels; I wonder if I can jump-flood a SDF from a step function on the trail maps and render this kind of effect for the physarum in real-time... Damn, I think I need to try. :D
Oct 8, 2026, 9:02 AM@nr4 Please do (try)! 🤩 Btw. I still have that sculpture in storage. Last time I looked at it was ~5 years ago and the glue from the printing process has aged/stained quite a bit by now, adding another layer of "organic" texture to it all. I'm planning to do another photo shoot of it in May 2028, when it will be 20 years old...