Wondering how to make crazy cubes that form shapes...

[Karlas]

create an object of a shape that u want the cubes to scatter around.
make the object not renderable (properties>uncheck renderable).
create a small cube.
create scatter on the small cube (create>geometry>compound objects>scatter).
select the first object as distribution object.
increase duplicates to 1000-10000 or whatever the number u want.
set rotation x:360, y:360, z:360.
play with other settings if you want.
hope that helped http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
for the second picture you could use spacing tool (shift+i) so that your cube would follow a line, but there should be a better way. can't think of it right now.

[gardocki]

Another option would be to use a particle system and have it emit along an object's edges. The second picture would be infintely easier with several particle systems set to emit instanced cubes, then bound to a gravity spacewarp.

[InuxMedia]

Thanks Karlas, that helped a lot. Unfortunately I cannot get rid of the base model and leave the cubes. Anyone know a way around that?

Gardocki, I've never used particles so that's a no go unless you can explain how to do it.

[InuxMedia]

Ok, next question. Is there a way to drop the bottoms of a lot of shapes to the Z axis? I basically just need to drop some of these scattered shapes to the ground.

[Karlas]

If your object is still renderable then turn on 'hide distribution object' in the display rollout.
I don't know how to drop them cubes to the ground(if you want an animation), but you can just place them there using the same scatter tool on a plane.

[Mouse]

I liked these images, so I thought I'd play around. The first one I did using scatter around the edges of a cube. I used two further scatter objects - area scatter on a plane on the floor (in hindsight a circle would have been better), and an edge scatter on a rectangle on the top face of the box, with small cubes scattered widely. All of this was rather simple, really - a new scatter object around the box's base would be good, to increase the density of the scattered cubes.

For the second one, I was playing around with a couple of the methods mentioned above and came up with a different way:

1) Make the object you want to repeat
2) Create an array of them, for both translation and scale, then group the array (ie to give yourself a long line of ever-smaller objects)
3) Create splines that you would like the arrays to follow, then apply normalize spl (not sure if that latter part is strictly necessary, but I did it anyway)
4) Duplicate your array as many times as you'll need it (ie for the same # of splines)
5) Pathdeform each array to a spline, and you're done

(ignore the poor shadows on these - I've still not gotten round to learning to do decent shadows)

http://www.tangledslinky.org/images/cubism1.jpg

[InuxMedia]

Oh, I already got it covered. Nice job though.

Here's how mine turned out:

http://www.inuxmedia.com/logo_cubes.jpg

[Waple]

The logo looks awesome, Inux. Thx for showing us this technique. I know I'll have fun playing with it for a while.

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