one of the upsides of a global pandemic has been that demo parties are forced to take place online. this is so great (especially for an american whose only made it to a couple european parties)! 😃

i had a blast watching and chatting along with revision and function which i always wanted to attend plus assembly and a bunch of others.

for his inercia party, ps did something really special and streamed his preparation work, demo shows, and seminars all throughout september. it was really fun to attend them and have something to look forward to with each.

it was really cool to visit boston for @party 2013 🙂

i broke my toe just the week before so i wound up hobbling around in a lot of pain but still had a lot of fun. i split a room with trixter and inspired chaos which was fun and kept costs down too. i was delighted to find boston has Chipotle and enjoyed a fine Massachusetts burrito while staying up late and finishing an entry.

i knew i wasn't going to be able to make it out to pixelj.am 2012 but i at least wanted to contribute an entry to the demo compo.  i asked basementdigital to see if i he'd be up for doing a tune.  we'd been wanting to do a demo together for yeaaaaars so finally made it happen!  with only a few days i thought it'd be fun to try doing a browser demo with javascript and planned to do it friday before the party on the weekend.  it was like wednesday night after basementdigital sent me the track he made that i found out remote entries were actually due the following morning!! yikes!  i loved the tune he did and couldn't let him down so stayed up to quickly put together the code and visuals for our entry.

with @party this weekend came the first releases of a new demo group vrtx (pronounced "vertex"). we did two entries for the freestyle graphics compo and got 2nd and 6th place. kirill did this sweet spider web scene and guybrush, kirill, and i did the mazelized text. watch out for more cool graphics and demos coming from vrtx in the future!

wow, cool! the invitation demo that kirill, gloom, and i made for blockparty 2009 was deemed one of the best invites of the year by 4sceners.de! that makes me happy. :) here's the google translation of their best of 2009 page.

i'm still bummed i didn't make it to the actual party. oh well in 2010 i should make it. i'm also planning on attending the new @party in massachusetts. oh and breakpoint in germany in 2011. fellow usa demosceners please go to all those parties too! :)

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:

gloom, kirill, and i have released our invitation demo to blockparty 2009! you can visit pouet.net to comment on the demo or watch it online at vimeo or capped.tv. hope you enjoy it!

blockparty 2009 invite from blackpawn on Vimeo.

i needed a quick script tonight to export a slew of curves outta maya and google failed me so now that i’ve hacked a quick script for it i figure i’ll post it for future lazy coders :) here you go - a simple python script to export curves from maya ;)

from maya.cmds import *
import maya.OpenMaya as OpenMaya
def findNode (name):
    selectionList = OpenMaya.MSelectionList()
    selectionList.add(name)
    node = OpenMaya.MObject()
    selectionList.getDependNode(0, node)
    return node
f = open("c:/curves.xml", "w")
f.write("<curves>\n")
curveNames = ls(type='nurbsCurve')
for i in xrange(len(curveNames)):
    f.write("    <curve>\n")
    curveFn = OpenMaya.MFnNurbsCurve(findNode(curveNames[i]))
    points = OpenMaya.MPointArray()
    curveFn.getCVs(points)
    for j in xrange(points.length()):
        pos = points[j]
        f.write("   
<point value=\"(%g,%g,%g)\" />\n" % (pos.x, pos.y, pos.z))
    f.write("    </curve>\n")
f.write("</curves>\n")
f.close()

okay nvscene 2008 was awesome! i'm almost fully recovered now from the many sleepless nights in san jose during the party. :) in the end the demo ryiinn, kirill, trace and i made tied asd's demo for 3rd place in the compo. not too shabby. :)

here's a video capture you can watch from demoscene.tv!

you can also download the full demo and rate it here: n-0505

i've posted a bunch of photos from the trip to my nvision 2008 photoset on flickr.

eek only a couple weeks left until nvidia's demoparty! i really gotta stop messing around with random experimentation and focus on making a demo. :P so since i may not be getting back to these for awhile here are some images of stringing some soft organic blobbies on a spiky armature

some failed coding experimentation last weekend turned into some creepy worms… this weekend i couldn’t resist putting them to music! ;) the music is a clip from trent reznor’s instrumental remix of reptile

here’s a special sneak peak at work in progress for a new demo! this is just one scene played for a long time with the awesome marilyn manson resident evil theme music. the geometry and animation is all procedural and video was captured on my laptop’s x1600. enjoy!

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