Friday, August 19, 2011

Sproxel Visits The Digital Orca

The SIGGRAPH conference was in Vancouver, British Columbia this year.  Both the city and the weather were beautiful, so it made for a great week.


A rather apropos sculpture named the Digital Orca by Douglas Coupland greeted convention goers just outside the center.  Some people refer to this as the "pixelized killer whale" but since you're on this page, you probably know it's not made of pixels, it's made of voxels!  This seemed like just the job for Sproxel.  I took a few dozen reference photos before I headed back to the Bay Area, and after spending a couple hours with the results and Sproxel v0.4, I created what I believe to be a complete model of the Digital Orca.


This model, as well as the Sproxel "tree" model you see everywhere on this page, are now available for download on the Sproxel Downloads Page.  Just download samples.zip, uncompress it, and load the CSV files into your favorite version of Sproxel!

I often find that using my own tools helps give me an appreciation for what users want in a software package.  This project encouraged me to implement a couple UI features that you will be able to use in the next version of Sproxel.  Stay tuned!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

August release delayed

Due to a nice vacation and this year's SIGGRAPH conference, I haven't had much time to work on Sproxel in the last few weeks.  I'll return to the Bay Area in seven days, and will be able to resume development, focusing on selections, slices, and a moving "builder brush" style development region (thanks for the suggestions on the feature requests wiki).  In the meantime, here is a screenshot of something I've been playing with.  I hope to have more news soon!