It’s been a long time! Here is some stuff we developed because we think the curve deformer in Softimage stinks and we wanted to have an opportunity to deform instanced (or copied) geo in ICE. So here you have a compound to deform geometry by a curve with built in twist and push, a wave deformer for curves and strands and a compound which can copy geometry and deform it by strands. The latter is supposed to be thrown on an empty polymesh and takes your strand featuring pointcloud as input. Hope you enjoy, use at your own risk!
There are some combinations of ICE- nodes I build everytime I’m working with strands. So as I finally put these combinations together as compounds, I thought it would be a good thing to share those with you. It’s all very (very) basic, but quite handy. Of course, it’s all about avoiding simulation, so these compounds are designed to be used in an unsimulated ICE tree. Description and download links after the click.
Finally, there is time to write down some of the sentences we spoke during our talk at the FMX! I´m going to start with the part about animating strands, because it covers many of the things we learned about ICE during the production of Loom.
Since I’m into link collections at the moment and there’s a recent thread on the XSI List with a lots of info, here’s a list of links to studios using Softimage. I am happy to find that many. Go Softimage!
It changed a lot of things for me in my everyday work and after a year of using it in production I’m thinking completely different about how we can achieve things….what is possible for us.
It only has been a few days, since I reminded you of Ptex being a promising solution for multi- resolution, uv- independent texture mapping. And guess what, developer Brent Burley just sent out a message that the Ptex library has been released as open source under the BSD license and is available starting today! So get your hands on, developers, we have been waiting for this! Burley´s full message including all links you need to start after the click.
I know it’s not the latest news, (the Ptex paper* by Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell and the clip above are from 2008), but it’s still hot- especially since Pixar announced Ptex support for upcoming Version 15.0 of Renderman Pro Server. In short, Ptex is a technique for per- face, multiresolution texture mapping without the need to setup your UV’s manually.
If you´re looking for a free but hitech way to handle your digital photographs on your mac or linux machine, you might want to check out Darktable. It´s currently in a beta state and being developed by Johannes Hanika, who is doing really awesome computer graphics stuff at the University of Ulm.
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