Category Archives: Artwork

L-Systems

L-Systems

I got interested in L-System based automated drawing, so I wrote a qiuck script to draw rule-based curves in Maya. These are the outputs of some well-known L-System shapes. The color progression from red to yellow shows you how the curves progress from start to finish. Here are the Maya python scripts for L-Systems: lSystem Maya… Continue Reading… Continue Reading

Galactic Map

Galactic Map

A friend of mine had need to develop a (mostly) fictitious map of the galaxy. Though he did a lot of work to base the resulting map on actual astronomical data, he had little time to polish it off into a readable map. Although this map still has some drawbacks, and overall still obviously has the… Continue Reading… Continue Reading

Menger Cube

Menger Cube

Today I found a good scene for our developers to use when trying to render large scenes. Lately I’ve been trying to write scripts to build Menger Sponges — a type of fractal made from cube shapes. 32-bit Maya is limited to depth=4 Menger Sponges. Perhaps the 64-bit Maya can render a depth=5 Sponge. I… Continue Reading… Continue Reading

Robot!

Robot!

I set out yesterday to quickly rig up a good set of “tank treads”, and this grew into a somewhat wacky-looking robot. The robot also dwarfs the tank treads, making the fact that they accurately roll along the ground seem less cool. I will add the tank treads as a tutorial, but I might wait… Continue Reading… Continue Reading

Radial Basis Function Surfaces

Radial Basis Function Surfaces

This is the current culmination of my research work for the CS department at the U of I. It’s an implementation of a radial basis function surface (RBF). The big dots are the control points – they define where you want the surface to go. The code solves the system and generates a function throughout… Continue Reading… Continue Reading