Music video by David OReilly.

Barthes on the punctum, from Camera Lucida:
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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.

Simple proof of concept: A Wii Nunchuk controller connected to Maya via an Arduino, which sends the Nunchuk’s accelerometer data through the serial port. Maya uses PySerial to open the serial port, reads the data, and converts it to an attribute value.

You can see that the accelerometer has quite a lot of “ring” from sharp shocks.

I based this test on Tod Kurt’s BlinkMChuck code. The Nunchuk is connected to the Arduino with this connector from Todbot. Here’s an archive containing the test files: WiiChukPOC.zip

And here’s a link to the setup required to configure pySerial: http://zoomy.net/2009/07/26/basic-arduino-to-maya-communication/

Code follows.
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Congratulations to Patrick Jean of OneMoreProd in Paris for beating me to the punch.

With the help of the patient people in the python_inside_maya forum, I’ve improved the Voxelize Meshes Script, mostly by more efficient use of the allIntersections method.

Instead of checking each point on the grid to see whether it’s inside one of the target meshes, this version shoots rays through the meshes along each axis and puts blocks at the intersections. This makes it approximately a zillion times faster, though I’m sure it could still be improved.

Update: Richard Kazuo from the p_i_m forum has excised lingering traces of pymel from my script, I’ve updated the code below with his improved version. It should now run with Maya’s default Python installation. Thanks Richard!

Update 2: Here’s the even-more-efficient voxelize_meshes_v.3.py … I’m putting this to bed now.

Maya Python code:
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This script will voxelize selected meshes over the frame range of the timeline.

It is currently rather slow.

Pymel code:
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It’s Dutch! More info at pivotthemovie.com.

Nice direction and art direction on this – the shading, lighting, and fx tricks are impressive. The exaggerated style of the character models felt appropriate as well… big hands, Gumby proportions. It’s a tricky thing to get something simple to look like it ain’t.

Cf Another World (known to me as Out of This World) which blew my tiny mind in 1991:

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.

Written in Python with PyMEL for Maya.

Code follows:
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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.

OOOctree_v.1.py

Usage and code follows.
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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.

Directed by Edouard Salier, produced by Digital District.

[Via Motionographer.]

Not to scale.

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.

How Globes Are Made, on Vimeo.

Guests from Overseas, by Russian painter Nicholas Roerich in 1901.

I found a sneaky bug in my overhang-detection code which was preventing altitude. Here are 10,000 blocks of altitude.

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