some time back i was experimenting with some procedural animation and simulation as part of researching how i could animate a creature for a future demo. i didn't really achieve what i was wanting but i had a lot of fun playing around with it and giving some life to a bowl full of worms. here's a video capture of them in action:

anyway, when kirill saw the worms he got excited and suggested that he could cut out the top of the fire skull so we could use it as the bowl for the worms. after that we decided we also needed to cut out the eye sockets so the worms could wiggle and drip out of the eyes! this was, as you may be able to imagine, entirely too much fun! i hooked up a hot key so we could drop worms into the skull and another to rotate the skull back and forth and we had ourselves a great little toy. here you can see it in action:

finally for fun we did some offline renders of it:

i'm not sure what the future holds for the skull worms. maybe a halloweentro is in order. :)

looks like this game is going to be pretty sweet! :D

back in april i sketched out then wrote up code to generate the 'elektropolon'. in my head it was this weird organic sack hanging inside another sack and having lots of small tubes suspended between and connecting the two. i imagined it pulsing or beating like a heart and shaking the tubes as it responds to music. anyway i wrote the code to generate the geometry and simulate it but it sat gathering dust on my hard disk these past months. friday night between rounds of battlefield 1943 i finally returned to it pulling it a little further into life with some nice colorful renders.

the geometry is actually a single surface that the code creates starting with an inside out box and pulling out the sack then picking random faces for tubes and pushing them in a bit then pulling them out to the outer wall. i want to have it merge with the outer wall but haven't coded that part yet so the tubes just end at the outer surface right now.

i was trying to make some cool stuff out of text glyphs and kinda failed. i thought: wouldn't it be neat if i could reproduce an image using a small number of glyphs from wingdings or even a regular font? i'd only need to store the quantized position, rotation, scale, the glyph itself and some color.

so i wrote a nicely threaded program to churn through the possibilities and find me some nice glyph placements. it uses the simulated annealing meta-heuristic so i could be lazy and just tell it how close it is to the target image and let it figure out for itself a good path to the minimum error.

unfortunately the results are not the coolness i was hoping for. :( i think packing of glyphs without overlap is much cooler in the end. with all the overlap it looks like a jumbled mess! okay here you can see what i'm talking about:

this weekend i upgraded my desktop machine to the intel i7 920 cpu. it's a hyper-threaded quad core chip and completely smokes the dual core it replaced. i got it so i could do some computation heavy processing but haven't finished that project and so can't show the results yet. however while coding i did keep the cpu busy doing more fun renders of my maze! check out the images below and you can also view the full maze set on flickr