Monday, August 8, 2011

Videos from presentation

The video below shows an oscillation  that involves cell population density as an important parameter



The following video shows the Maya plugin nTinker integrating TinkerCell simulation with Maya animation


The following video shows "work in progress" that will allow simulation of physical effects such as washing of cells, etc.


The type of behavior that I would like to produce in Maya is this


The presentation slides



Sunday, August 7, 2011

TinkerCell3D renamed to "nTinker"

Since it uses the nParticles system, I thought that it would be more suitable to rename TinkerCell3D to "nTinker". Here is a video of TinkerCell interacting with Maya animation via the nTinker plugin. The link between colony-level and cell-level dynamics is controlled by customizable python code.


Friday, July 22, 2011

TinkerCell inside Maya

Just playing with Qt and C++ plugin interface for Maya. TinkerCell, since written in C++, can be loaded into Maya as a plugin window! The plan is to use TinkerCell to visualize the inside of cells and Maya to visualize a population of cells.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Experimenting with Maya



At first, my idea was to create numerous cell objects and use Python or C++ code to scale each shape (i.e. cell growth). I was hoping that Maya's physics engine would take care of the collisions. However, collision during scaling seems to work differently from collision during translation events.

Now, I am trying a different idea using the nParticles feature in Maya. In the screenshot about the "instancer replacement" option is used to replace the instance of each particle with the shape of a cell (roughly). The particle self-collision is turned on. Next step is to see whether I can control the movement and behavior of each particles. More importantly, the particles need to replicate. I am hypothesizing that perhaps I can make each particle into a particle emitter. The emitters would have to be slow, otherwise they will clog the screen and CPU.

Friday, July 15, 2011

nParticles Link and target video

Nice set of Maya nParticle examples
http://www.the-area.com/blogs/duncan/some_fun_stuff_in_maya2011

Another nice video (without accompanying script unfortunately):
http://vimeo.com/9368284

Need to reproduce something like this using Maya: