Archive for ICE
That “metaball” look (has got to go)
Posted by: | CommentsIn a recent discussion online another artist complained that metaballs have a distinctive look and that that look is never seen in nature. I get what they’re saying, “blobbies” are kind of like lensflares in that they are useful and necessary but can easily be overdone and distracting. But I would also point out that they don’t have to look “blobby.” Below are a couple of images created easily and in just a few minutes using ICE and emPolygonizer2 (and photoshop for the one, because I just had to fiddle around…)
I am a metaball mesh, yessir.
threesixty3D
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http://www.threesixty3d.com/software/
XSI users may want to check this out, the site has some tools and plugins for XSI, including a free set of ICE compounds, a metaball (pay) plugin, and some very nice scripts.
The $100 euro metaball .addon is pretty nice, many of us have encountered it’s ancestor as the popular free metaball tool which has been around for a while now. Now a grown up product for sale, this plugin adds ICE compatibility as well as the added/cleaner functionality of allowing metaball models to be constructed by hand, through “metapaint” etc. The tool includes not only spherical implicit metaball primitives but cylinders and cubic meta-surfaces, which is a welcome addition. The generated meshes are reasonably clean and can be set to use several models of meshing.
This took just minutes to set up and bake, tuning the meshing was really fast.
There’s a fair amount in here for the money, feature wise. Usage is pretty straightforward, and the mesh generation is fast. Since ICE users are wanting any mesh generation tools they can get their hands on it’s worth taking a look at the free demo, and my first take is that this tool makes a nice compliment to Eric Mootz’s emPolygonizer. It’s definitely a lot of fun to play with!
Fun for the four-minute Borgmann in all of us.
Ice – stretchy strands
Posted by: | CommentsDoing some stuff with strands. This is pretty primitive still, have to get dynamics working with strands which are constrained on either end, and come up with a scheme for breaking strands, tweak texture approach etc.
Slipstream VX
Posted by: | Commentshttp://www.exocortex.com/simulation I’m not sure how long ago it happened, but the exocortex high-speed smoke tool “slipstreamVX” is now available, and at around $400 isn’t cheap but not as pricey as I would have expected either, particularly not for the kind of results it delivers and in an extensible, ICE-friendly manner.
http://www.vimeo.com/11901355ICE getting stronger and stronger.
Posted by: | CommentsRumors persist about ICE being expanded into Maya. 2011 introduces ice kinematics. And Hybride and Thiago Costa blow people away with ICE simulations for the feature film Predators. Thiago’s Loagoa engine teaser has gone viral, so I’m going to add myself to the tons of people wowing over it…here it is:
http://www.vimeo.com/13457383Wow indeed!
Even distribution emission test
Posted by: | CommentsICE vortices test
Posted by: | CommentsJust another test, rotating particles around average neighbor pointposition.
Diffusion limited aggregation redux
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Over time people have been asking me to share the DLA compound I wrote waaay back. So here it is.
http://www.vimeo.com/11122031The compound can be found in the downloads section.
Diffusion limited aggregation is a natural phenomena in which particles in solution build up over time – as particles are deposited they limit the locations where subsequent particles can be deposited, resulting in a pseudo-random growth of deposits with characteristic nodules and ‘fjords’. You can see examples of DLA systems in nature all over, from veins of copper to urban growth patterns. In this simple ICE implementation particles are emitted from geometry and then pulled towards a “seed” point, namely the point cloud the compound is applied to. If there are no existing points in the cloud the first will be deposited at the origin. This causes DLA structures to build towards the provided surface and then to spread across it or inside it’s volume. The compound has a turbulence node which adds a random tropisim as well as a vector input for user-directed tropisims. Please be aware this was never intended as more than an experiment: it works fine but is a pretty simple implementation.
To use: apply the compound to a point cloud (typically with a single point) in a simulated ice tree… Read More→
Chris Marshall posts his ICE tree building workflow
Posted by: | CommentsChris is on my short-list of about 15 people who have been consistently pushing ICE. He’s also been a prolific ICE advocate online. Recently he posted this neat blog entry showing how he’s been creating procedural trees in ICE.
http://www.vimeo.com/6471481Example scenes released
Posted by: | CommentsA lot of people have been using an ICE compound I made a while back, “Emit instance matched to SRTs.” I made it during a game cinematic project to allow me to animate pre-scored geometry for explosions.
