I have been messing around off and on trying to create a 3d cellular automata model in Maya using expressions. It is fairly difficult to create an agent based or object-oriented system using expressions because once you drive an attribute from within an expression it cannot receive any other inputs (unless I am missing something or there is a utility node that allows this). So it was a little harder than doing something like this in Flash. The only delta from the outside is time, which is controlled by the timeline. I also had a problem with the names of the cells and the child check. The end result only gives birth to a cell in every other space. This creates a sort of 3d checkerboard effect. I tried to sort this out, but gave up for now. I don’t think it looks, bad its just that you have all of the useless cells. You can download the cell file below and an updated duplicate script that allows you to create a 3d grid of the cell. Make sure you set all of the cells Timer attribute to -4 and then go to frame 1 on the timeslider. Choose a cell and set Timer to 0 (this will be the original) and playback the animation. It works best with over 6 cells in each direction, but it can get heavy with over 20.
Download source: cell.mb + duplicate3d.mel
