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!

Download: http://cgportal.de/files/monophyl/PLND_Deform_Stuff.zip

Disclaimer: I did the Renderman shading and lighting job, while my Polynoid buddy Csaba helped developing look, comp and textures.

Enjoy!

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 the link:

http://cgportal.de/files/monophyl/Unfold_XSI.rar

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!

Download CurveFlow

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.

There are 4 compounds:

- Create Strand: Just throw in your target position

- Strand FCurve: Lets you drive attributes along your strands with a FCurve

- Turbulize Strand: Gives your strand positions some variation

- Strand Growth: Animate the progress of your strand with this compound

There’s also a super simple sample scene.

Check it out:

Compounds

Sample Scene

Because the Siggraph CAF’s jury seems to kind of like what we did the last year (Loom, Mem), the Polynoid crew (unfortunately Tom will be missing) is going to attend the show! We will be having a making of presentation on Tuesday, so if you missed it a FMX in May, here is your second chance! There will also be a small FMX booth that we will be hosting on Sunday (25th, whole day), Monday (26th, 1:30- 6:00 p.m.) and Thursday (29th, 1:30- 6:00 p.m.), so help us having a good time there by stopping by and having a chat with us, we’re looking forward to it!

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.

First of all, ICE seems to be understood by most people as a simulation environment. But what makes it so special for us is actually the fact that you can drive the movement of particles (and strands) without relying on simulation but being independent from the timeline. Of course, with kinematics being supported in Softimage 2011, ICE will step a little bit further away from being understood as a simulation tool. And like I said during the talk: Houdini users might laugh about us being so excited about things they have been doing with their tool of choice for years, but having a kind of “baby Houdini” inside the software we produce our movies with is nothing but totally awesome.

Simulating your animation often seems to be a fast way to move your stuff around, but when it comes to tweaking and staying in control, things often become more and more complex, frustrating, unstable and thus time consuming. There were many things, we first tried to solve with a simulated ICE tree, but the more we became familiar with the way ICE works, the more we moved towards finding unsimulated solutions for our tasks. We are still making movies, so we always have just to make things look like they were real- if we can fake it for the benefits of control, it´s more than fine! Although there are many many particles and strands involved in Loom, there is almost no simulation used.

One of the more difficult tasks was to make strands grow from a certain position to a given goal with having full control over the way they take as well as the timing of the animation. What made the tasks difficult is, there were almost 4000 strands involved, so there had to be a solution to handle both animation and performance. Simulating the whole thing brought us exactly what I mentioned above: long simulation times, no timeline scrubbing, and growing complexity for control.

So here is how we did it the unsimulated way- it´s not big science, but a really easy and flexible setup with awesome performance:

Assuming you already have your point- filled pointcloud, first of all, you define your goal (start is already defined with your point position). Building a linearly interpolated array with your point position and goal position as start and end values gives you a set of strand positions. The larger your array is, the more subdivisions you have in your strand.

Having your linear strand ready, you would now start to model the way your strands take from start to end. For that, you need to be able to edit different positions on your strand separately. You can do this by just piping your strand positions array through a FCurve. With what comes out of the FCurve node, you can now vary whatever value you want along your strand. In terms of driving the position of the strand, we used mostly just blend nodes- with the FCurve driving the blend value between the existing strand position and the position (or direction) you want the strand to take on its way.

Making your strands grow is also really easy: you just delete values from your strand positions array starting with the last value in the array (your goal position). You can do this very easily by just using another array for the values you want to delete. When it comes to animating the growth, the modulate by volume node gives you a good tool to vary and drive it.

Of course, what you get with this (really easy) setup so far is pretty linear movement. The fantastic turbulence node can help with this, just insert it wherever needed…! If you´re trying to vary values based on strand positions, be sure to pipe the strand position attribute in the position slot of the turbulence node. Otherwise, all strand positions will get the same value based on the according point position.

In case you are dealing with a large number of strands and have trouble rendering: by default, the geometry generated is super high tessellated. To decrease tessellation, you can use the undocumented attributes shaperesolutionu and shaperesolutionv. You need to pipe an integer into your set data node, before ICE will recognize it. This does not work for segments.

That´s it! Really easy, I would say and far from the complexity you get trying to simulate that thing… Hope I managed to write this down in an understandable way- if there are any questions, feel free to make use of the comments or write an email!

The Polynoid boys have some news to share! First of all, Polynoid’s home in the cloud has been updated with our latest projects: there is a teaser of our newest short “loom”, as well as a full version of “mem” and we have a 2010 reel. Check it out and let us know what you think! And for those who are interested in having a closer look at the way we work: we are set to talk about that during our workshop at the FMX 2010 on wednesday, may 05, 5-6 p.m.. See you!

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.