03 CELLULAR/

REACTION-DIFFUSION

Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion running in ping-pong render targets.

Cellular: dithered still of the reaction-diffusion scene

cellular/readme.md

Approach

Two chemicals, U and V, diffuse at different rates and react. The update runs as a fragment shader that reads last frame’s state texture and writes the next, so it works on WebGL2 as well as WebGPU.

Techniques

  • Nine-tap Laplacian with diagonal weights to avoid grid-aligned artefacts.
  • Several simulation substeps per displayed frame for stable, fast growth.
  • Feed and kill rates vary slowly across the domain, so spots, stripes and mazes coexist in one frame.

What to look at

The left side tends toward spots, the right toward labyrinths. Hovering seeds new V where the pointer is.