Japhy Riddle creates art, music, films, and animations. He is also a retro technology enthusiast. Naturally, he combines all of these skills and interests into an amazing creative output! I followed Japhy on social media and love his high quality videos and animations. Check him out on YouTube!
Voxel slugs traversing the edges of the invisible cube
A few days ago a new animation of him popped up: it shows three colored slugs moving around the edge of an invisible cubepositioned and directed so that they never touch each other! Japhy creates the animation by printing each frame and combining them into the final result, leaning into the print offset registration errors which is very nice.
Interactive version
I thought it would be fun to make an interactive version of the animation, and I chose to do it with LÖVE (aka Love2Dalthough I do 3D rendering in software). I stopped copying the printing errors, but that can be done by drawing and compositing in the same way that Japhy did it. Here it is:
The three are a crowd
I spoke to Japhy and we discuss how it is possible to maximize the number of slugs. If it is six cubes long there can be 4 of them in the cube instead of 3. So, with the help of my interactive and controlled animation version, I figured it out and added it. If the slugs are shorter then more of them can go around the cube, and the same if the cube is bigger. But those are challenges for another day! I might even make a screen saver of it at some point.
Downloads
You can download it (like .love, macOS .app, or Windows .exe) and play the animation yourself. There are a bunch of hot keys that change the cube in different ways. Have fun!
https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/voxel-slugs.png
2025-01-17 01:13:00
