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.

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.

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:

Introduction Slides