I’ve been thinking about writing a script to do the geometry equivalent of the old pin art boxes –
I wanted to be able to take a grayscale image and generate an array of box geometry to the dimensions of the image, setting the height from the pixels grayscale value (or perhaps even an average of a NxN group of pixels)
My aim is to use this to preview the geometry and export the box height data out to file.
I have seen bobo’s old max2 tutorials which is a great starting point. Has anyone else seen anything like this done before via MXS? I do want to get my own solution but as always, any help or pointers appreciated.
I know these things are a bit cheesey, but I’ve always kind of liked them
Yes, Adam Wierzchowski made this toolset back in 2002.
http://www.pxfactory.eu/scripts/pinsman/pinsman.html
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Do a search on CGTalk, I am pretty sure I posted a tutorial about doing this in PFlow.
If you download the scene files form this tutorial you’ll get the script which builds the pinbox from 2 objects: the pinbox mesh and the pin. I wrote it especially for that tutorial and pretty much every line is commented making it really easy to follow.
The script ads an instance of the pin object to every face of the box object using an attachment controller.
The tutorial appears to have been created by Lee Johnson – how were you involved?
Lee wrote the tutorial and I made the script based on his idea. Read the first paragraph in his animation part of the tutorial: http://www.jtwo.com/J2_Graphics/TUTORIALS/Entries/2008/11/26_Animate_a_Pin_Art_toy_in_3ds_Max.html
Wow, thanks for the great responses guys!
I posted quickly and went out so was amazed by the quick responses.
bobo – thanks, I thought about doing this in PFlow and will take a look. Your max2 tutorials are still useful, though!
Nate, Anton – Again many thanks, I hadn’t seen these before.
Zoran – This is exactly what I was thinking, even down to the bilinear interpolation method used.
I will have to make a couple of adjustments to the geometry generation bit but it’s exactly what i was after. I’m hoping to use it as a guide for making the geometry as a wooden piece of artwork, so i will write out the height of each box and sort them into heights ready to cut. I also thought i would generate a layout bitmap with the plan of the boxes with spacing and the height written in each one to aid the construction of this.
cheers chaps!
very cool… was just trying to connect the dots here
=o)