Hi again.

hedphelym, at first it was a primitive but now I've  made it into a modifier.

Here it is applied to a geosphere:

http://folk.ntnu.no/havardsc/scripts/Tessendorf.rar

Here is the .ctx file, the class library and the corresponding .maxml file, as well as the source files for the class library.

(Some of the code has a c++ style over it since it is more or less a direct port from the source link posted in my first post, and I didn't want to break anything before I got it working :))

It would be cool, in addition to the mesh output from the modifier, to also add additional data as output. Maybe they could show up as readable properties on the object? Say I want to add vertex velocity data as well as the mesh as output. Further I could create a lab texture that used that data as input to create some cool maps. 

Going to dump some more tests I did:

A flocking modifier;

In this case the boids are bound by these weighted rules: cohesion, alignement, separation, maxspeed, movement inertia, max bounds and a leader (the static box). 

it's somewhat based on this http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ without the neighbouring constraint, it just using a spherical distance to determine neighbours to ease the implementation. I also use a kd-tree to speed it up a bit.

Code: http://pastebin.com/G0XTgVAz

The next thing is a cruel heightfield water implementation as a geometric primitive, inspired from this nice talk http://www.matthiasmueller.info/talks/GDC2008.pdf

As a friend of mine put it, a boat driving through jelly:

The collision is just a position delta length times a user defined scalar on the grid points inside the boat.

Code: http://pastebin.com/5EgEQG0y

The last thing is just a quick implementation of a voxelizer:

A static method pastable in a script node: http://pastebin.com/ugzaTseA

It's a single mesh, yes. Here is a screen of the setup with the modifier disabled: http://i.imgur.com/gawy4.png

The leaderTransform and predatorTransform should be properties like the rest of the input instead of arguments of the update function, but I had trouble of getting the updated values in the previous build and tried different setups to get it working.

I can compile and rehost the stuff again. My site got taken down since it was hosted on my university's host and I just graduated half a year a go. I also got some other small projects I can post. 

Hi again,

I uploaded some projects to a repository: https://bitbucket.org/havardsc/laboratorium.

The first project is spacecolonization, an elegant algorithm for creating structures that don't intersect with  themselves, like branches and veins. In short, the algorithm scatters attractor points that the structure move towards and 'eats' them up when they are close enough. The actual algorithm in implemented as a spline, that grows over time. In addition, I added a mesher that can animate the thickness of the structure over time. Here are some examples:

Just the spline growing on a teapot. The attractor points are scattered on the surface of the teapot.

A spline growing on a plane with the added mesher on top, increasing the thickness over time:

A structure growing on a teapot with a negative thickness growt value:

The next project is a simple deformer with the option of creating creases on the edges of the mesh collisions as well as returning to it's original state.

A collision with edge creases and and the mesh returns to it original state:

A simple collision with an added flex modifier:

The last project is a little test I did to create a custom user interface that controls lab. It is a texture plugin that creates a cruel camoflague pattern using 5 different colors. These five colors is fetched from https://kuler.adobe.com/. The gui lists 15 random colors themes from Kuler and the texture changes accordingly when you select a theme. The gui is created using wpf, and the textureplugin is automatically setup using maxscript. The color themes are fetched asynchronously from the web so the gui does not hang when the color theme list is fetched/updated.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks in max:

Here is an example of how I usually set up these projects:

- First you need to copy the .dll files to the %localappdata%\Local\Ephere\Library\bin folder

- Then create a nameofmydll.maxml file and it content should look something like this:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
MetaAssembly Name="nameOfDll" xmlns="http://www.ephere.com/modeling/dependency/metaassembly.xsd" LicenseCode="Ask for key"> 
Pluggable Type="FullNamespacePathToClass.Class"/>
/MetaAssembly>

So in my case, to expose the space colonisation and deformer projects, the file looks like this:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
MetaAssembly Name="HavardscLaboratorium" xmlns="http://www.ephere.com/modeling/dependency/metaassembly.xsd" LicenseCode="Ask for key"> 
Pluggable Type="HavardscLaboratorium.Deformer.Deformer"/>
Pluggable Type="HavardscLaboratorium.SpaceColonisation.SpaceColonisation"/>
/MetaAssembly>
   

Here is how I set up the space colonisation project in the plugin:

First I create the spline class from a static constructor taking a mesh where the attractor points are scattered on, as weel as starting points for the structure. The spline class has an update method that takes a time variable and outputs a spline. This spline is feeded to the mesher, which also is created from a static constructor and an update method which takes the spline as input. The mesher update method generates a mesh that is the output of the plugin.

So that is how I usually do it when creating stuff with Lab. The code in the repository not documented in any way and is pretty sloppy, so be aware :)

The repository is now (hopefully) public.

I can probalby write some stuff down on how to do the wpf gui, it's pretty straight forward. The only issue I had was getting .net events to work when hosting .net controls in a rollout of a custom attribute's. (Some details on that here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7804882&postcount=1)

Edit: I forgot to add that in order to run the camogenerator project you would need a Kuler-key to access the API, which they at the moment no longer give out. I don't think it would be smart to add my Kuler-key to the repository since it is public.

Thanks hotknife!

I added a new project which lets you get a 3d map from anywhere in the world using Bing maps, I think it is really cool to play with. It creates a wpf-control from Bing that lets you zoom in anywhere and with the click of a button the map is instantly transferred to max with elevation data applied. It is an adaptation from this blog post: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2013/02/12/3d-elevation-models-with-bing-maps-wpf.aspx

Got a couple of questions:

Is there a way to apply smoothing groups to a mesh using lab/coden?

Can I upload/distribute the project's .maxml-file? Im asking since it has a license code attached to it.