Ok, so I admit I’m pretty new to the whole idea of programming. Not that I’m totally ignorant of it’s impact in today’s world, but I had never really sat down and got to grips with it until joining the CVA course at BU. However, the other day I got to see how useful it can be in the most random of ways.

So my sister had been spending a lot of time back at the family home whilst planning her wedding. During that time she had been working on a graphic design project for the car company Hyundai. One of the designs involved using what I can only describe as a “dot fade” system in a grand way, see below:

However there was a slight hiccup with her art director, who couldn’t/wouldn’t recreate the style, leaving her in the very laborious dilemma of recreating this by drawing the individual dots in Illustrator. Luckily, I had been doing some previous work with her on the project and knowing I am a dab hand at all things computers, she asked me to have a look to see if I could work out a quick and easy method for the dot creation.

I immediately thought of the work we had been doing in one our programming projects, which involved creating photoshop-esque “filter” systems where images are recreated in “dot” styles. I had also completed a similar style project in Maya which involved creating a cube “squid” – something I had been inspired to do after spotting a similar creation on the internet.

As this “squid” had pretty much all the variables (row lengths, row amount, scaling etc) I needed to create “banks” of objects in Maya, I could easily edit and change the code to create the dot fade system, and with a little more editing create the alternating “steps”.

With a little cleaning up, I created a nifty little script which hopefully my sister can use whenever and for whatever she needs. By inputting the required values into the script and quickly applying a base surface shader (to recreate the render as 2D objects rather than 3D) with the right colour, I can quickly render out the exact still needed. Many brownie points were gained, easy.