Archive for xsi
Mercedes Santa
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Mercedes “Santa.” :30, created snow rig using slipstream/fury which was then implemented into the shots by artist and friend Sue Jang. Method/NYC. The actor is Peter Xifo – nice job Peter!
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…
Wild Star
Posted by: | CommentsCongrats to the guys at Carbine and Blur for a fantastic introduction to WildStar, an exciting online game in development. What an awesome trailer!
Images
Posted by: | CommentsThis isn’t anything special, just a slapped-together polygonized ICE/slipstreamVX pointcloud I made a while back.
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
Congrats to Exocortex for Harry Potter VFX
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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.
Janimation Facial Animation
Posted by: | CommentsThis demo shows Janimation’s facial animation methodology. Mocap is run thru face robot for retargeting and to generate some base shapes, which are then sculpted and stored. A rig then uses ICE in some clever ways to blend those shapes as controls are driven by the mocap data (or new data) plus there are some other tricks. While Face Robot is used early in the process, the end result rig is proprietary to JA, and much faster and easier to work with. Cool stuff.
