This script will voxelize an animated mesh. It creates an array of cubes which fills the bounding box of the mesh’s motion through its animated range, and animates the visibility of each cube over the frame range based on its proximity to the mesh.
It’s quite slow, and would be faster if it used my octree, but it’s a start.
Please find below an expanding object-oriented octree implemented in Python with PyMEL for Maya. In this configuration, the octree functions as a space-partitioning scheme used to quickly find intersections between the bounding boxes of objects in scenes with many objects. It is not perfect but it does the job.
Another frozen moment… but the revealed characters and the sense of scale at the end are intriguing. The pacing works for me too, but that may have more to do with the Massive Attack track.
This donut was grown on the banks of the Upper Avon, and is popularly known as Shakespeare’s Donut. First described by Washington Irving, it was later the inspiration for the plan of the Globe Theater. Not coincidentally, a globe’s outer surface may be described by the transverse rotation of a sideways donut. However, this is not recommended.
Here are 2500 cubes all smushed into another cube without overlapping, which I accomplished by means of a cleverly-arranged series of object-oriented whistles and knobs in just over two of your Earth minutes.
Normally octrees start large and subdivide. This is fine for static scenes, or scenes in which the boundaries are known, or scenes managed by reasonable people.
Being perverse, I decided to make an octree that could adapt to its circumstances, and grow extra layers if necessary to accommodate objects beyond its limits.
This, my friends, is what we are witnessing here today. The first live, growing octree ever captured on film.
As locators generate, this octree subdivides to keep any node from holding more than 10 at once. If a locator generates outside of the octree, the tree grows super-nodes until the point is contained.