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!
To avoid going through hell animating this by hand, I recently built a compound for flipping cards. It’s all in one cloud, so you can just copy and paste, move, scale and rotate your rows around. Length and progress are connected to to the nulls’ scaling, but of course you could also connect all of them to a volume, if you don´t want to have extra keyframes on every row. The shape is an instanced grid, which was necessary to move the rotation center of the objects. I’m adding one point at each null´s position and then clone the points and move them towards the parents´edges as well as modifying their rotation. The rest is simply calculating rotations between spaces and stuff and adding a bit of variation. Screenshots after the break- the tree looks a little wild, so feel free to use the comments if there are any questions…
Update: I uploaded the scene file- as said, it’s a little wild and scaling is hardcoded at the time. So use at your own risk, but I think it could be helpful being able to have a closer look at the ICE tree…
Here’s an ICE compound that lets you have your (of course, unsimulated) points flow along a curve. The cheap trick is to wrap the points around the curve, so you have a neverending flow of particles- but you always have the same amount of points. Using the awesome modulo node is the way to do it and, as always, no big magic involved here. Rotation is linked to the timeline, so you can animate a constant roll and the usual turbulence nodes are in there, too. The compound has an output called PointonCurvePos, which lets you drive whatever value you wish along the curve. Click below for demo scene and compound, comment section is open for your thoughts… Enjoy!
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.
Berlin based artist crew transforma and french director Yro are set to premiere their collaborative project “Asynthome” on friday, april 9th at NÉMO LE FESTIVAL DES ARTS NUMÉRIQUES. Asynthome is a Live AV- Performance and the teaser (above) looks awesome. I love how transforma handcraft their stunning visuals and everytime I see some of their work I’m wondering why we are going through the painful process of exclusively using computer generated imagery for our work instead of, you know, “real” life. You just have to watch the making of “synken” to get jealous about the way they work while you’re sitting in front of your screen the whole day. Be sure to check out transforma’s website and their vimeo channel as well as yro’s website, it’s really cool stuff.
For those (few) people who haven´t seen this awesome video yet: watch it! For those who have already seen it (several times): go read the Q&A session over at Gizmodo with OK Go talking about how they did this piece and their music videos in general. Pretty interesting stuff!
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.
Animatronic designer John Nolan has put up an awesome gallery showing his work without makeup. Nolan has worked on movies such as Hellboy 2, Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire, and- you guessed it from the image above- Where The Wild Things Are. Love it! Two more images after the break, full gallery and more info on John Nolan over at his website.
There is a basic question that probably concerns everybody who does creative visual work, “What is the origin of form?” – MIT designer and architect Neri Oxman explores this question in her Ph.D. dissertation and shares her insights in this talk at pop!tech. Watch it on vimeo and also have a look at Neris website if you like.
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