My first print! It’s not really a cube. It’s the 20mm calibration box, but from above it looks like a cube, and the alliteration is nigh-impossible to resist.

The hexagonal infill pattern makes it look like a pat of butter fabbed by MakerBees.

Tradition dictates that one inaugurate one’s MakerBot with a commemorative saying upon the initiation of its first print. While the suggested phrase — “Fire the MakerBot!” — has many attractive qualities, when the time came I was feeling nostalgically geeky, and for those reasons chose “Make it so” with a Patrick Stewart/Sean Connery conflection* and a concomitant “Engage” gesture to make sure it knew I was serious.

It worked pretty well. My cube came out very slightly squashed on the bottom, which I understand means either the build platform was too warm or my gesture was too fast.

* 1. A conflation of inflections 2. The dialect of a pastry

I built a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic over a recent four-day weekend, and took a timelapse movie of the process with my Canon point-and-shoot using the Canon Hack Development Kit. The 26 minutes of video in the playlist below run at a speed of an hour a minute.

I’ll start posting the results of my builds soon.

Error-catching in MEL with the catch command won’t catch a “variable does not exist” error, so use whatIs instead:

if (`whatIs "$test"` == "Unknown") {
print "yes";
} else {
print "no";
}

There ya go.

Thursday is Matthias Hoegg‘s graduation film from the Royal College of Art in London.

Writing expressions in Maya is a huge pain. The error messages are vague, there’s no stack trace, and the editor is a text entry field with no line numbers, syntax highlighting, or line wraps. And Maya forbid you try to write a script with a dynamically-generated expression in it — then everything has to be a giant encoded string. And when you try to run it, it squirts venom at you from its eyeballs.

However, it’s possible to write and edit your expression in the text editor of your choice, save it to a file, and import that file into your script at runtime. This is much, much nicer, and comes with less venom.

There’s a way using fread to put the entire contents of a file into a string at once, but I had trouble with it — this way, reading a line at a time, seems to work better. [Based on this tutorial from Jay Grenier's Script Swell.]

Code follows:
Continued »

Combining two of my great loves – Robotron and cubes – this looks like what I thought all games would look like by now, when I was 12. Coming from Lexaloffle in August 2011. I can’t wait.

Here’s a Maya script I wrote to trigger the selection of one object with the selection of another, inspired by Hamish McKenzie‘s Trigger UI, as seen in Andrew Silke‘s venerable Generi rig.

The script makes a scriptNode, which creates and tracks a scriptJob. The scriptJob checks selected objects each time something is selected, and if the control object is first in the selection list, the target objects will be selected as well. Since scriptJobs only last until the scene is closed, the scriptNode also re-creates the scriptJob when the scene is reopened.

I’d like to draw your particular attention to line 34, wherein I escape a backslash six times.

Download script here: selectTrigger_v01.mel

Code follows:
Continued »

Occasionally in my Maya rigging work I want to use and animate a ramp (or many ramps) as part of a node network, but going through the ramp-editing interface is tedious, and the graph editor doesn’t give me the visual feedback I’d like. So I wrote a script that creates a simple interface for manipulating a monochrome ramp in the viewport.

Note that real-time feedback is only available in the viewport’s “High Quality” mode.

Download the file here: rampRig01.py

Continued »

So my site was hacked a while ago — it took a while to figure out how, because it was sneaky, and I was busy hunting bears in the outback.

Mildly interesting details follow.
Continued »

More classic frothy Frenchy goodness — the natural stylistic progression of the super-flat Supinfocom style, a kind of madcap WPA/John K. meringue. A lot of good stuff in here regardless. I do wish they’d left off the English voiceover.

Nifty making-of stuff including character sheets at their bloog.

Good luck, kids…

Intentional and attentive.

New attachment support in my favela-generating code, plus a Romanesque model set, and I’ve got a collaboration by de Chirico and Dr. Seuss.

Gorgeous trailer for The Eagleman Stag, an as-yet-publicly-unavailable short from animator Michael Please of London. The subsurface scattering and global illumination is amazing. Also, that’s a deceptively simple build — it takes a lot of polygons to make a model look that clean.

What? Stop-motion? Oh.

Well, that explains how he’s getting such smooth samples in his AO pass.

[Via Ward Jenkins on Drawn.]

Feast your peepers: a tower of techno-Babel, topped by two posts and a lintel. I’ve now caught up to Neolithic architecture.

It’ll be more impressive in a few days, I promise.

Between Bears from Eran Hilleli on Vimeo.

[Via @brangrow.]