Post-simulation and softimage ICE (part 1)
“What happens in the post simulation tree stays in the post simulation tree”
A quick review: ICE operators are evaluated differently depending on where they reside in the construction history (also known as the operator stack or modifier stack.) When an ICE tree is under the modeling region it is evaluated every frame unless a simulation region exists – if it does, it is evaluated once. An ice operator under simulation is evaluated every frame, and all data is updated every frame. In other words, changes persist and appear in the next frame – if you move a point, in the next frame that change is reflected. And when an ice operator is in a post-simulation region, it is evaluated every frame but changes are discarded. The “lower” regions evaluated first, then each region “above” it in the explorer, like so:
This is very, very useful. You can have an entire simulation going in the simulation region, and then do stuff to it prior to display. For instance, you could cull out all particles which aren’t visible to the camera to reduce cache size and speed evaluation. You can calculate per-particle lighting prior to rendering it, to control lighting entirely within ICE. Or, in the example below, you can move points around without altering the original simulation.
Example: Strand shapes
Here’s an interesting “look” done entirely with strands in ICE. A typical particle simulation has been used as input for an ICE operator in a post-simulation region, which uses the simulation as a basis to draw many circular strands.
First, I made a very basic particle simulation:
Then, in a post-simulation tree, I drew the strands.
… So you can see that for this effect the bulk of the work was done in the post-sim ICE tree. I use the point positions and orientation from the simulation as a center point around which I add new particles with strands. In my next post I’ll show exactly what I did, but the point I’m getting at here is that things don’t have to end with merely a simulation. You can get into some very cool stuff by considering each frame of a simulation (or a cached result) as a starting point. You can deform your entire simulation, rig it to a character, light it, or perform housekeeping tasks like camera frustrum culling. You can even treat the entire simulation as a single unit and scatter it – they sky’s the limit.
A quick note about motion blur:
When I wax rhapsodic about the post simulation tree the most frequent argument I run into is that moving particles around in a post-simulation operator invalidates motion blur calculations. This is true. Motion blur is based on the velocity of a particle, which can be considered a vector from the previous point position to the current. In the post simulation operators, the previous location is unavailable… it’s like a dog’s sense of time, only what exists “now” has any meaning. So, you have to do some extra work if you need motion blur. Basically, you store the previous point position into a user variable which can be read by your post simulation ICE tree and use that information to calculate not only how you wish to move a particle, but how you moved it in the prior frame as well. From this you can calculate a valid velocity to pass to the renderer for motion blurring. That sounds awful, but it’s not really that bad. (Still, it would be handy if the devs gave us an easier workflow than this, for instance could they store and give us access to post-sim point positions and velocity or something?)
Next:
We will look at creating the offset strand shapes – circles, stars etc. Stay tuned!