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.]

Made with my foetal citybuilder script, rendered in with mental ray using the misss_physical shader.

From 1975, based on a story by Sergei Kozlov, directed by Yuriy Norshteyn.

I am led to believe this is Miyazaki’s favorite animated work.

[Via mjduffy.]

Voxelizer 1.0 is a script written in Python for Maya. It builds an array of animated cubes in the shape of selected target objects. It takes the color of the cubes from the texture and lighting of the object, and respects visibility and transparency. It also allows keyable voxel and gap sizes, by checking the sizes of optional control objects.

Download files here:
Voxelizer1.0.py
Voxelizer1.0_test.ma (Maya 2010)

Instructions and code follow:
Continued »

Adorableness from animation superman Patrick Boivin who is not French but almost.

Fantastic character animation, design, pacing, and plot from Dark Prince production, led by Jérémy Clapin.

Very economical animation — almost stop-motion.

Separate controls for the size of the voxel grid and the size of the cubes.

The code now respects alpha, and can vary the cube size.

Returning to the scene of the cubical crime…

I’ve found a way to apply colors to my mesh-voxelizing script, by sampling the color of the source model with Maya’s polyGeoSampler command. Incredibly, polyGeoSampler isn’t queryable. It’s used to bake the color of a mesh’s textures to the vertices of the mesh. So once you’ve done that, you can query *that* color with the polyNormalPerVertex command.

This technique only gives the expected result as long as your voxels are larger than your polys. Isn’t there any way to return the color of a texture at a given point on a poly?

Music video by David OReilly.

Barthes on the punctum, from Camera Lucida:
Continued »

A variety of shapes growing upward, ever upward, and occasionally outward, supported from below, except for the ground floor, which is supported by pure force of will.

Beautiful and spookily compelling bitmap magic from Toronto-based pixel-charmers Superbrothers.