From Dirigibles to Lattice Tools....

After my previous posts I began to wonder what I could do next and I figured that a Zeppelin would be a cool thing to make with it's rigid skeletal structure and canvas outer... plenty of textures and materials that could interact with one another to produce some interesting simulation.

Anyway, I was thinking about how to make the rigid structure of the airship, not a particularly taxing modelling exercise but one that could be easier... something like the lattice modifier in 3DS Max would have been ideal but nothing like it exists in Maya 2013. Sure there's probably plenty of free plug ins that do the job but where's the fun in using something someone else has made when you can try and solve a problem yourself?

It was pretty straight forward to write a script that created a lattice from a poly object and it got more interesting when I decided to make the user interface for the tool, so many things to learn variables, procedures, arrays and all the other stuff that comes with programming.

I got there in the end and Lattice Tool 1.1 was born!

I'm pretty pleased by the fact that it works, there's always room for improvement, hence this being the second version and possibly not the last, but for now it gives the required results and is not confined to creating airship frameworks......

The object in the image wad created in seconds using the lattice tool on a sphere... well technically it was a smoothed cube but I'm not going to be pedantic about it! Anyway, I made the video below using many copies of the object, I'm not too sure what happened to the quality when it was compressed for Vimeo (they're usually great) but it looks a bit grainy.... oh well.

I still haven't made my airship but I'll get around to it soon enough.