There oughta be a Blender plugin to animate growth

The plugin only adds a single function to blender, called generate growth data image. The growth animation is based on a path finding algorithm called A*. From a starting point it calculates the path to each pixel with the lowest cost. The cost is just a value that you can associate to each pixel and the cost of a path is the sum of all the costs for the pixels along that path. You can define that a white pixel costs 1 while a black pixel costs 5. A path over four white pixels would cost 4 and is preferred over a path of a black and a white pixel with a total cost of 6. The default value of the plugin for the cost of black pixels is 1 million, so by default the algorithm should only cross the walls as a last resort if no alternative path exists. Depending on how you set up the time per pixel, this timestamp can be compared to animation frames, but most of the time it is just an arbitrary value and you would animate a reference timestamp.