Hello to all,
I'm doing a school project and need some help with Mel, hopefully you can give me some advice.
What I'm trying to do is generate a building with the help of a genetic algorithm and as evolutionary factors I have chosen wind and sun. The basic idea is that the building is composed of cells and they represent different spaces within a building, for example living, bedroom, kitchen etc. Each cell has different attributes, like tolerance or need for sun and wind. For example some cells might need to be exposed to the sun, while others might need to be placed in a high wind position.
For the sun I have written a sun position script that locates the sun based on the place coordinates as well as the month, day and time. For the wind my plan is to use a Maya fluids wind tunnel.
My first question would be how to create a wind tunnel with Mel? I want to keep it simple, so probably one of the fluids examples of Maya will do. Is there a way to obtain a pre-generated fluid info and apply it to a newly created container? Or how can this be done? I'm thinking that the applyAttrPreset command would do this.
Once that the wind tunnel is working, the info of each cell needs to be obtained, looks like the getFluidAttr command does this, but I don't need to read the data of all voxels, just the ones located around the building cells. How can I get this voxels?
Summarizing all that, what I would like to know is:
Is there a way to load a previously generated fluid solution?
How can I get the voxels around some geometry object?
The sun is another point, but if you can help me with the wind part for now, it would be great.
Thanks in advance,
Carlos