Recently got back to working on the asset manager and finished the UI
I also created a basic draggerContext command for maya that can sample the world position under the mouse, and then raycast to an object to sample the current position over the object. Next step is to position the object and attempt to orient the object to the surface normal
Right now it is only capable of generating a single curve, so any branching breaks the curve right now, but i have had some in help in finding out there is another type of node in maya for storing what is essentially an array of geometry.
The nodes come under the name of ***VarGroup and hold multiples curves, geo etc. Next is to change the output of this LSystem node to be plugged into one of these groups instead to allow or branching to occur, and to still be stored under a single node
Ive always liked LSystem and creating fractals, and in the past i had created the most basic version of an lsystem in python, and used maya to draw the curve from the generated instructions.
Using that as a base im going to implement LSystem in Maya but as a node this time, so everything can be made procedural, and update automatically through mayas DG
I have recently been working on a project with a few friends where we had quite a lot of assets that needed to be placed in a scene, some accurately some needed just to clutter the scene. A tool that can do this is something I've wanted to make for a while and since i know much more python and PyQt that last time i tried this i thought it would be a fun project to undertake again
In this project we are also doing a crowd shot, which we will be using the evaluation version of Golaem, this will give me a better chance to understand how Golaem works before continuing work on my own crowd tool.
I Always liked the idea of creating things like black rubbish bags or plastic bags by wrapping a mesh around some other geometry to simulate that effect, and other apps like Modo already have this, so i thought i'd make one for Maya as a custom C++ node.
Here a video put together kind of quickly.
It uses ray casting as its default behavior for finding the child geometry, then moves along its normal until it collides with the child geometry. The other option is "Use Closest Point" which find the closest point on the child geometry and moves the current point towards that. Both give different results which can be usable.
Next will be making so i could use it to create UV's rather than geometry try to some shrink wrap unwrapping.
Here is a short demo of the Voxeliser Node i created for Maya using C++ to create a custom Maya node. It accepts a mesh as an input to be "Voxelised" and outputs polygonal geometry to be connected to a shape nodes "inMesh".
It uses ray-casting to detect if the mesh is at the next voxel position, and creates the cube through Mayas API rather than a python command. The reason for this was the idea to try and add various shapes to use as a voxel other than a cube.
I also implemented it as a node rather than a command, as this tool can also work on animated geometry as well as having animatable attributes.
The next feature im planning to add it the ability for the voxel to sample the color at the current position on the mesh. This will help to make retro style versions of existing characters etc.
I've began work on a voxeliser node. I found one someone had made using python, but with any kind of dense mesh, it's incredibly slow. Also it was implemented as a command like tool, so any uodates and the command would need to be re-run.
Looking throufh its code, i found it searched for its nearest point by sampling everypoint on the mesh (very slow) so i think ill try and create one using some ray-casting techniques
