A personal study rebuilding Lovelock and Watson's 1983 Daisyworld model in Houdini, to see how I'd visualize a self-regulating system myself.
Scope
Client
Year
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Challenge
(01)
A Model You Watch Instead of Read
Daisyworld was built to show that a planet can hold a stable temperature without any organism intending it. The model has been implemented many times, generally as a line plot of temperature against solar luminosity. That plot shows the outcome clearly but not the mechanism producing it, which is a continuous competition between two populations. I wanted to see what the model looked like when it was given space.
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Solution
(02)
Running It on a Sphere
I rebuilt the model in Houdini as a spatial solver. Points scattered across a sphere each carry a temperature and a daisy type, evaluated every frame in VEX: black daisies absorb light and warm their surroundings, white daisies reflect and cool theirs, and both grow fastest at the same optimum temperature. Temperature drives the surface color, the daisies read as black and white grains on top of it, and solar luminosity increases across the run. The patterns are not authored, they are the direct output of the equations.
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Conclusion
(03)
Homeostasis, Made Visible
The planet begins cool and patchy, overshoots into high temperature as luminosity climbs, then cools again as white daisies take over the surface. Seen in motion, the regulation reads as something the system does rather than something imposed on it — the stability is a byproduct of local competition, not a rule written into the model.
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