Archive for ICE
Misc Images
Posted by: | CommentsThese are pretty much randomly chosen screenshots and production images, plus some photos, in no particular order…
Busy, Busy, Busy…
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been a while since I’ve posted, things have been really busy of late, and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. There are a number of topics and compounds I want to share, but between work and home-life demands I just haven’t gotten to cleaning them up and writing them up. However, I just picked up a longer-term gig doing more feature film work and less commercials, so I may be able to settle into a routine that frees up enough personal time to get to some of this stuff soon.
Maybe I can get a bunch of stuff online as a Christmas gift to the community – I’ll be “heads down” in November but might have time after that…
Topics include:
- Fury 2 – this point renderer by Exocortex is starting to come into it’s own, with cast and self-shadowing, particle replication at rendertime, a standalone and maya version, etc.
- ICE terrain compounds – a long term project which I’ve detailed here, I’d like to add in some adaptive meshing (most of it was built prior to ICE modeling) and a better fluvial erosion compound, and release the compounds to the community.
- Electrical and lightning effects – I have a very nice “toolkit” of ICE tools for creating electrical effects which I want to clean up and release to the community.
- A slew of “utility” ICE compounds and one-offs for doing all kinds of fun stuff… from converting temperature to color according to a blackbody and color cycling compounds to branching strand systems and procedural snow deposition, etc. All compounds which come from production needs which I’ve been squirreling away with the intent of eventually sharing them.
ICE default nodes
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been slamming away at production here at Method NYC, but when Vladimir Jankijevic posted this image to the XSI list I had to take a moment to put it here. This is an image of all the nodes which come with ICE by default. Considering that many regular ICE users add about 100+ of their own custom nodes, that makes for a pretty crazy number of options. ICE and Nuke both appeal to me for many of the same reasons… both are well thought out and excel at being both powerful and fast tools for demanding work. Now, back to this gig…
Verlet Spring Water Simulation
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been done by better TDs than myself, but a question arose on SI-community so I decided to pull out and dust off a simulation I slammed together during green lantern in a couple of hours, as an example scene. I put this together when we were doing rapid look dev for a “green energy” effect at PLF, where a woman is rescued by splashing into a surface of “water” which then turns into a flood and whisks her away from the fight…
You can find the compounds and the scene used to make this image here.
More compounds for download
Posted by: | CommentsI admit it. I’m bad about remembering to post compounds for download. But not today… I’ve added a bunch of simple-but-useful compounds, some of the ones I use fairly often for a range of tasks. Included are a bunch of emission filters which can be used for all sorts of things, such as controlling placement of scattered objects, such as the tree cards in the images below. Enjoy. – AM
Fury Particle Renderer gets Furious-er
Posted by: | CommentsAs long as we are talking about Exocortex, they just posted this exciting preview of the next version of their point rendering tool Fury.
For those of you wondering why this is important, it’s simple enough. Fury is fast. Really, really fast. And it was written by Ben Houston, the original author of Krakatoa, a tool of choice for rendering particles. Softimage, Max and Maya users alike can move their simulations to ICE (or create their simulations with ice directly) and partake in the Fury awesomeness.
LOOK at it. 1 million points. Self shadowing and cast shadows. 1-second-per-frame.
“The major new features in Fury 2.0:
* GPU-accelerated particle self-shadowing
* Shadow maps
* Built-in compositing previewing.
* Command line renderer support.
* Synchronized Softimage and Maya support.
In this example, 1 million points are lit and rendered in about 1 second per frame and the shadow map is also created at the same time. Motion blur and DOF do not slow down rendering time.
The simulation in this example is from a alpha-version of SlipstreamVX 2.0 and thus the smoke motion isn’t quite perfect in this video.”
Congrats to Exocortex for Harry Potter VFX
Posted by: | Comments
There is a good article online about Exocortex and the work they did using Slipstream VX for the last Harry Potter film. You can find it here.
Some excerpts:
The pool, known as the Pensieve to Harry Potter fans, contains an oillike liquid that sloshes around in its basin whenever someone gazes into it. While they had managed to make do with available tools in previous Harry Potter movies, this time around animators wanted the effects to be bigger, better and more realistic than ever before.
Houston, 32, sold the company a piece of specially designed software that mimics real world physics and helps to accurately create water digitally. The water special effect had taken Houston more than three years to perfect. The software tool was designed to work with Gradient’s existing special effects software.
“I went and further customized our software to meet the needs of the Harry Potter production,” said Houston, adding the experience has been “awesome.”
Animators at Gradient learned about Houston’s software from a review in a computer graphics magazine, he said.
Having written the magazine article in question, I couldn’t be happier for Exocortex. Good work, guys!
1 minute ICE greebles
Posted by: | CommentsPretty much the simplest kind of greeble “look” you can make in ICE, emitting simple boxes on a surface with a turbulence on scaling to add interesting variance… Expose the scale parameter in the emitter to add a bit more variance, and you’re there. Needless to say, it’s simplistic at best, but with some AO it still looks interesting…
ICE crash shot
Posted by: | CommentsFrom a couple of years back, when ICE was very new.