@meow: wow, this is really cool. have you had any of your own designs 3D printed? i'm curious what this thing would look like in real life
no, I haven't - gets pretty pricey as the volume of material goes up
Here is the product page for that one, with digital renders for the various materials it can be ordered in: http://shpws.me/L8X5
That's supposed to be a reasonable simulation of the material.
I'm working on a design variation for a potential patron who found my work on Shapeways.
Not of the alien spore, but of this one: http://shpws.me/L79e
Once I have more of the mesh library completed I want to hook it up to my L-System and CA library and create massive worlds of this stuff.
I need to experiment with more indexing optimizations with core.matrix, finish implementing all the Conway polygon operators, add a few more subdivision smoothing algorithms like Delauney and Butterfly and also write a custom xml writer because my main bottleneck right now is that X3D is a poor file format design and I can't make clojure.data.xml any more lazy than I already am so on big meshes I run out of memory when I go to output the X3D file.