threesixty3D

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.