Click the “New Lorenz Attractor” button to get things moving…

This mini-project was a bit of fun developed in conjunction with initial work in developing a Soft Pebble ‘Simulation Architecture’. The simulation architecture exists as a C++ DLL and allows simulation clocks to be created and ticked. Each simulation clock can have associated simulation systems which, in turn, can have associated simulation models.

The ‘Lorenz Attractor Simulation’ is based on a system first discovered by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s whilst developing an early, simplified computer model of the weather. It was one of the first non-linear mathematical systems found to exhibit chaotic behaviour and is an example of what is commonly called a ‘Strange Attractor’. As the plot traces out over time, each newly created 3D point represents a new state of the system. Just like real weather systems, even states in the very near future are almost impossible to predict.

The equations and simulation of this Lorenz Attractor are implemented in the Soft Pebble ‘Simulation Architecture’ as a way of testing its core functionality. The ‘Simulation Architecture’ C++ DLL exposes methods that are accessed from Unity C# scripts to control the 3D visualisation. The Unity Universal Render Pipeline was used, built out to WebGL, and embedded above.