Today's Holiday was the inspiration for the colors used in this image. I figured out that using Maya's Paint Effects to generate the geometry on the line my script generates is probably the way to go. It is fully animatable, can be converted to geometry and I do not have to deal with the upper limit of 400 lattice divisions.
A few months ago I bought a new laptop. It came with Windows Vista but I would get a free upgrade to Windows 7, and I did about a month ago. I did not want to deal with the downtime during the semester, but after having handed in the grades (that is: entered them in an on-line form) I felt it was safe to upgrade.
I should probably do a web search on the differences between Vista and 7, and why either is better that XP. I hope there are a lot of improvements under the hood as I have not found many on the surface. A lot of re-shuffling, that I did notice. And that it is harder to get rid of the Eye Candy in 7 (the Germans call this "Augenkitzel" - in stead of being fed sweets the eye is being tickled) like the fades on windows. I did find it and switched the display settings to best performace. Great! Now it almost looks like Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I think I'll keep it this way. Interesting how they do admit that all the visual effects do affect performance.
Now I just need to get rid of that terrible login screen...
The semester is finally drawing to a close, so it is time to reflect on things past. Like the discussions that transpired during the last two faculty meetings. Something about digital artists versus more traditionally oriented ones. Or was it practical thinking designers versus fine artists? My notes and doodle are inconclusive. I know we discussed the merits of having two people at the helm of a department reinvented as school. Or lack thereof.
No idea what inspired the image below though. Must have been totally immersed in the arguments.
With the semester just about over I found some time to port a Python script I wrote for Blender to Maya in the hopes of animating the result nicely. I got stuck in Blender when I ran into transparency / alpha issues with the node based materials. Probably fixed in Blender by now, as the issue with nodes not being animatable has been addressed. Here is a test:
Only a curve is generated procedurally, the rest is a hand "crafted" test. Found some stuff in the old script that should never have worked. The line is still intersecting and there are a few more issues, some of which I may not actually care about as long as it looks good.
Earlier Posts: Animated Swirl, Plane Render
I have absolutely no idea how this thing got 308 views on YouTube in about an hour...
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