Comments for zoomy dot net

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by anthony mcgrath

anthony mcgrath — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:12:35 +0000

cool mate – cant wait to see an update

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by zoomy

zoomy — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:12:05 +0000

Thanks Anthony, good suggestions — theoretically I could make all of these options available, so the user could choose the option that best suits their needs.

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by anthony mcgrath

anthony mcgrath — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:29:54 +0000

hi there
I’ve just been playing with your script a little and I think its superb! I created a simple 3 frame animation, ran the script and got the result I wanted excellent. however I then decided to group the meshes per frame to tidy my scene up which I was happy to do manually (for the sake of 3 frames lol). This is where things got strange for me as a maya user.. You are setting keys on the scale from 1 to 0 so when you drag over the cubes in the scene that are meant to be on the NEXT frame in order to group them up, you end up selecting them on the other frames also.

A simple workaround for this was to edit your script so anywhere it sets an attribute value for scale I simply changed that attribute to visibility instead. It works a treat and when you group those cubes per frame manually you now no longer select the meshes on the other frames
A natty option would be for the script to give the option to combine all the cubes on each frame into one mesh node or if you dont select that option it simply groups all the cubes under an appropriately named group node eg. frame0_GRP, frame1_GRP, frame2_GRP etc..

hope that helps and makes sense mate (typing it quite tired lol!) mate – awesome script
ant

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by zoomy

zoomy — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:27:51 +0000

I see what you mean — there are a few things I like about having persistent cubes, but your recommendation would make the final scenes much lighter. Maybe I’ll do a variant someday…

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by Peter P

Peter P — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:12:47 +0000

Right now its working as a large intersection matrix cube. Wherever there is intersection a cube is made and if the object goes back to that old position the position is called from the dictionary and reused.

The problem with that method is if you have a large mesh or long animation frame count covering large distance your poly count goes up very quickly.

I was recommending on reusing old hiden cubes by means of translating them into new positions every frame. That way you could reuse a lot of old cubes and only rely on keyframes instead of poly count.

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by zoomy

zoomy — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:01:19 +0000

Hey Peter,

It should be reusing cubes — every time a new cube is made, it’s added to cubeDict, keyed by its location; then, when a new location for a cube is identified, cubeDict is checked to see if there’s already a cube at that spot; that’s the “if x not in cubeDict” line.

I’m not sure I follow your suggestion about complex angles — the code doesn’t do any checks for complexity of the model at all, it just puts a cube wherever a ray happens to hit something. Are you talking about using larger cubes for bigger masses, and smaller cubes to fill in detail? That would be another swimming pool of worms entirely.

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script v.2 by Peter P

Peter P — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:28:53 +0000

I looked at your code and it seems to be generating cubes every frame positioning them and animating visibility. Is it possible to reduce the number of cubes needed and reuse old cubes from previous frames through keyframing new positions for the old cubes? and perhaps calculate if extra cubes will be needed on more complex angles?

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script by zoomy

zoomy — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:48:36 +0000

I’d love to make it a plug-in, at the moment it requires so much preprocessing it wouldn’t work for something that had to evaluate every frame. There’s another approach I want to try though.

Will definitely have to be faster.

Comment on Voxelize Meshes Script by Peter P

Peter P — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:30:23 +0000

Love it. I think something like this would benefit from being developed as a maya plug-in. Perhaps faster execution time and maybe even a maya node that you can just plug the geo into, set frame range.
Great stuff.

Comment on Pymel OOOctree by zoomy

zoomy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:10:18 +0000

Thanks for the comments!

I haven’t tried multiple growth points yet, but it would be fairly simple, and is also on my todo list. -_- Multiple octrees wouldn’t be necessary for this – in fact you’d have to use a single octree for everything, to keep the growths from colliding with each other.

Time-wise, the only factor is really the number of objects in the octree, so if the final shape is the same, the calculation time would be the same as well.