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!

4 comments:

  1. Cool model and pretty cool tool, too. Here's an ambualnce I made (smoothed in Blender), and I also posted another model in TIGSource forums thread.

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  2. Hello! Do you have the block pattern for this sculpture you can send me asap? I'm making a miniature model due for this thurs & could use some help! Thank you!!

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  3. Hey Becca,

    Yeah, the block pattern is available as a CSV (comma separated value) file here:
    https://code.google.com/archive/p/sproxel/downloads

    Download samples.zip, and extract the file digitalOrca.csv from the archive.

    This CSV file can be loaded in various different programs. Excel is one of them, but there are others as well (sproxel being one). You can also examine the csv file with a text editor and get a sense of what the layers should look like.

    Hope this helps!

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  4. I can see that you are an expert at your field!digital signage app I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success in your business.

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