Fill with boxes

[revelationsr]

Hi there.
 

I am rather new to Houdini. I have this little project I would love to crack so any help would be awesome.
 

I have the shape. Lets say a character. I want to fill this shape with boxes. Now I could take a group and compare a grid to the shape and then use the copy sop. But what that will end up doing to have boxes stick though the skin of the shape. Ideally the corners of the boxes should not stick through the geometry of the shape. That is the first problem.

The second is that I want to have different sizes of boxes. If one could imaging lego blocks. There are a verianty of shapes. Ideally I would like to have the bigger blocks in the core of the character and then fill in the areas closer to the skin with smaller block. Also if there are longer blocks, then have them fill in appropriately as well. I am sure this will no doubt involve a grid and some very clever groups comboed with a copy sop. It is like I know what to do to start the effect and end it. Just the complicated middle part is really bumming me out.
 

And here is problem three. I would like to assign a shader to the boxes based on the colour of the texture of the character closest to the box. So if the stomic of the character is red. Then this shader will be added to the boxed close to the stomic. There as the head is green then I want to add that shader to the boxes closest to them.
 

Cheers

 

 

 

 

[H2O]

Hi revelationsr, 

 

I'm not sure to totally understand what you want but maybe this hip file could be help! 

 

cheers

ANIMATED_BOXES_TEAPOT.hip

[Skybar]

Dunno really, this might give you some ideas. Instead of using the float attribute 'pscale', you could instead use the vector 'scale' on the points. Then you can control the scale in XYZ if you dont want perfect boxes.

 

dv_fillboxes.hipnc

[H2O]

Great Skybar,

 

Much more efficient than mine and I guess less heavy to calculate.