Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Rob, that´s a nifty-cacheable image-seq for post! Can I compo it? is it possible to share the scn? :D :D Please? On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:04 PM, pete...@skynet.be wrote: I hope the image gets through. this is what I get with closest location on group of curves, and combining the pointtangent as a force, as well as a force pulling towards the closest position – in order not to stray too far from the curve. particles get emitted from the curves in the center, and you see that here they follow the curves more closely, further out it does get more fuzzy – but they do follow the curves and they do branch automatically. I can see how this might not be precise enough compared to flow along curve. [image: force_along_group_of_curves] *From:* Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.com *Sent:* Thursday, March 19, 2015 5:52 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [image: Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete r...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc. autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
I don't know, Luc-Eric can be biased as he seems happy with AD, unlike the developers that left, but you got to appreciate the fact checking you get out of his presence here. There is enough bias in the other direction anyway since AD isn't exactly well loved, so I find his contributions bring good balance. I'll take the occasional drizzled up parade in exchange for that. On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote: You don't have to rain on our imaginary parade Luc-Eric. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know about that 5k number; the potential Cinema4D/softimage overlap is probably around 1500 seats total. After SI|3D, Alain was working out of Japan in consulting and not directly on the XSI product; he contributed the older user normal editing tool that was in the netview. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Oliver Weingarten li...@pixelpanic.de wrote: ...maybe 15k potential users seems to be an inetresting amount for other companies than AD ;) ...fingers crossed somebody comes up with something coming even close to good old XSI..! Am 18.03.2015 um 16:27 schrieb Stephan Haitz: Could it be there are set free quite other energies with the EOL of Softimage than intented? Am 18.03.2015 um 14:24 schrieb Ed Harriss: Maxon… as in Maxon Cinema4D? If so, exciting! I’ve been using C4D and it’s got some really, really great stuff but there are a few areas that could use some Softimage style love. ;) Regardless, we are working on integrating it into our pipeline. Ed From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Greg Punchatz Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 9:14 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal Ex softie Alain Laferrière leading a new dev team :) -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
For the people who are lucky enough to have met and worked with Alain, and/or the fruits of his labour, you may start imagining the quality of stuff coming Cinema 4D’s way. :-)
Re: Alembic performance?
Thanks for the insight Ben. I just needed to know what might be possible for me here - I am happy and thankful you made Crate available so I can work on these shots at all :) Cheers Morten Den 18. marts 2015 kl. 19:53 skrev Ben Houston b...@exocortex.com: Exocortex Crate has a shared framework for loading Alembic data that we use across Maya, 3DS Max and Softimage -- so most of the loading code is shared, just the DCC-specific stuff isn't. Maya is just a faster DCC when there is a lot of objects in the scene - for +1000 objects, Maya is at least a couple times faster if not more. -ben Best regards, Ben Houston (Cell: 613-762-4113, Skype: ben.exocortex, Twitter: @exocortexcom) https://Clara.io - Online 3D Modeling and Rendering On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 6:31 AM, Morten Bartholdy x...@colorshopvfx.dk wrote: I am stuck on Softimage 2013SP1 so I am using Crate for opening alembic files. I am currently working with shots where we import alembic files created in Cinema4D and they contain many thousands of objects that scale and rotate. With Crate they are pretty slow to work with - scrubbing the timeline is slow, and creating overrides in various passes is slow. I can see our Maya artists can actually scrub the timeline in Maya pretty inetractively with the same files, so I take it the built in version from Autodesk is faster that Crate. I am curious to know if someone here have tried the built in alembic loader in a newer version of Softimage and had the opportunity to compare it to the one in Maya? Best Morten
RE: baVolume fog pass with sprites
Thanks Holger, job finished now but will keep this for future occurrences! a _ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Schoenberger Sent: 18 March 2015 21:25 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: baVolume fog pass with sprites You can use the BA Color Switcher. That sprite mode has a workaround for this issue with volumes or distance shaders. Afaik this is a mental Ray bug, not a bug in the SI sprite shader. Holger Schönberger technical director The day has 24 hours, if that does not suffice, I will take the night _ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of adrian wyer Sent: Friday, March 13, 2015 2:50 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: baVolume fog pass with sprites hi guys, trying to render a non homogenous fog pass for a shot, that has sprite shader cut outs of people on particle cards getting a very odd render result where the people are lighter than the surrounding fog! anyone seen this and found a solution? ideally don't want a solution that changes the RGB as the client has signed it off! thanks a Adrian Wyer Fluid Pictures 75-77 Margaret St. London W1W 8SY ++44(0) 207 580 0829 adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com blocked::blocked::blocked::blocked::mailto:adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com www.fluid-pictures.com blocked::blocked::blocked::blocked::http://www.fluid-pictures.com/ Fluid Pictures Limited is registered in England and Wales. Company number:5657815 VAT number: 872 6893 71
Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
I'm loving working with Houdini, but sometimes it's just frustratingly slow. Even with the new VDB tools, converting and caching everything out as volume fields is a real drag. But then again the caching workflow is super-slick. I shudder at the thought of all the time lost to the mysteries of ICE caching. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole there is a script for that mentality... there is a sop for that G
Re: scalar state still working?
Thanks for all the input guys! Got it working in the end with just a simple incidence. On 18/03/2015 20:28, Matt Lind wrote: Scalar state should be working just fine. I assume you're trying to compute incidence using a dot product? Make sure your input vectors are unit vectors and described in the same coordinate space. Also make sure your vector orientations are described correctly as well. Remember, the viewing vector is opposite what you need it to be as it points towards the subject. If you don't meet those criteria, all bets are off. If all is correct, the output will be the cosine of the angle between the two vectors which you may or may not want to linearize for use in the gradient. Matt Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 18:31:45 +0200 From: Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com Subject: scalar state still working? To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Hey guys I remember using the scalar state node, with a gradient, to create a gradient based on incidence... this doesn't work any more?? Am I being dumb, or is it broken? G
Crashing with unknown error message.
I am rendering alembic files with a number of passes with material overrrides. It has worked fine so far, but after setting up the last passes on one particular scene it fails to render the new pass, crashing on the farm. Softimage2013SP1, SiToA 2.8, Crate for Alembic IO, RoyalRender. This is the error: R93794| HDF5-DIAG: Error detected in HDF5 (1.8.9) thread 2408: R93795| #000: ..\..\..\..\..\Shared\hdf5-1.8.9\src\H5O.c line 1059 in H5Oclose(): not a valid object R93796| major: Invalid arguments to routine R93797| minor: Bad value R93798| R93799| \\Skynet\LicensFolder\RoyalRender\bin\win\rrCheckexitcode.exe -1073741819 0 0 R93800| +++ R93801| +++ R93802| Render Executable done +++ R93803| Royal Render checks the return code of the executable R93804| ++ 03.19. 13:07.13 + R93805| Executable returned -1073741819 (0x c005) as exit code for frame 0. R93806| + Render crashed R93807| - Does anyone here what this error might be? Best Morten
Re: Crashing with unknown error message.
This won't help you any, I'm afraid (sorry), but, if I am reading this correctly, this appears to be a known issue with Alembic: https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 Greetz Leendert -- Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
before saying slow or fast regarding volumes or vdb we have to talk about the resolution of the volumen, and the amount of fields involve. same with DOPs , after mentioning ALL the plugings, dops can interact with all the solver at once, that means will take in consideration, RBD, with liquids with gases, with wire etc... all togheter at the same time, instead having to do one, cache it, run sim with other plugin, and repeat.lj (also is cheaper to get houdini than get all the addons/plugs etc... apart) in advantage you get great support instead of getting the general we dont support that because you are using it with another pluging that its not ours. El Jueves, 19 de marzo, 2015 8:45:56, Ciaran Moloney moloney.cia...@gmail.com escribió: Network and hardware are fastest I've used. It's just the nature of the work. Volume data in my case is not very large, only a few Mb per frame. But, e.g. to make useful collision fields from complex geometry often requires a good bit of SOPs pre-processing. I get the impression that much of SOPs is still not especially multithreaded. DOPs is also very slow vs solvers of comparable classes (FumeFX, Exocortex's Bullet, nCloth). But, that's generally OK since you can do so much, much more with DOPs with a very low chance of things failing apart as you scale up. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Is this processing time or hardware time? (disks, network, etc..) Of course saving gigabytes per frame is slow but may be a clever local SSD sync to the main server could do the job to make the process faster? jb On 19 Mar 2015, at 12:56, Ciaran Moloney moloney.cia...@gmail.com wrote: I'm loving working with Houdini, but sometimes it's just frustratingly slow. Even with the new VDB tools, converting and caching everything out as volume fields is a real drag. But then again the caching workflow is super-slick. I shudder at the thought of all the time lost to the mysteries of ICE caching. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole there is a script for that mentality... there is a sop for that G
Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
I see what you're getting at, but I don't interpret it that way in this particular instance. Alain was dispatched to Japan around the same time Luc-Eric joined Softimage. Since Alain worked on Softimage|3D and games, and Luc-Eric XSI and UI/compositing, they probably didn't interact much (whether they did or not, I have no idea). Alain returned to Montreal in the mid 2000's, and left the company soon after. I see Luc-Eric's comments as providing the only part of the picture he could based on his limited interaction with Alain. Matt Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 10:01:23 +1100 From: Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com Subject: Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com I don't know, Luc-Eric can be biased as he seems happy with AD, unlike the developers that left, but you got to appreciate the fact checking you get out of his presence here. There is enough bias in the other direction anyway since AD isn't exactly well loved, so I find his contributions bring good balance. I'll take the occasional drizzled up parade in exchange for that.
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [image: Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete r...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc. autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
RE: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
I was about to suggest IDs too. If you look in ICE_Kinematics workgroup, there are some scripts to handle applying and updating ICE trees that set IDs on all objects in a group. You can adapt them, then you’d need to rerun them whenever you add or remove curves in the group. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 1:19 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Like Rob said, you'll have to go the ID approach. If you know what particles should follow which curves its easy. If not, then you'll have to setup some logic. Create a custom param set on each curves named the same thing, like curveData. Then for each curve set a unique ID starting from 0. Main branch should be 0. Then the next branches off of that should have higher numbers, and so on and so on. When you emit your particles randomly (or with some logic) set an ID of the curve you want them to follow. You could then get closest location on each curve, and test if the curve ID is greater than the one it started on. If so then you could use some state machines to switch states. It's going to be a complex tree I think no matter what. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:10 PM, Cristobal Infante wrote: get closest location point-tangent. Use this as point velocity, I did something like this with several curves and it was fine. On 19 March 2015 at 16:52, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.commailto:tekano@gmail.com wrote: closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.commailto:d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.commailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.commailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
merge the curves, job done.. On 19 March 2015 at 17:24, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: The main problem with this type of stuff is that you can't get closest location on each curve at the same time without building a huge compound. You want to get the closest location on every curve, compare, and follow the closest one or switch with some logic. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:18 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Like Rob said, you'll have to go the ID approach. If you know what particles should follow which curves its easy. If not, then you'll have to setup some logic. Create a custom param set on each curves named the same thing, like curveData. Then for each curve set a unique ID starting from 0. Main branch should be 0. Then the next branches off of that should have higher numbers, and so on and so on. When you emit your particles randomly (or with some logic) set an ID of the curve you want them to follow. You could then get closest location on each curve, and test if the curve ID is greater than the one it started on. If so then you could use some state machines to switch states. It's going to be a complex tree I think no matter what. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:10 PM, Cristobal Infante wrote: get closest location point-tangent. Use this as point velocity, I did something like this with several curves and it was fine. On 19 March 2015 at 16:52, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.com wrote: closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [image: Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto: pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
The main problem with this type of stuff is that you can't get closest location on each curve at the same time without building a huge compound. You want to get the closest location on every curve, compare, and follow the closest one or switch with some logic. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:18 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Like Rob said, you'll have to go the ID approach. If you know what particles should follow which curves its easy. If not, then you'll have to setup some logic. Create a custom param set on each curves named the same thing, like curveData. Then for each curve set a unique ID starting from 0. Main branch should be 0. Then the next branches off of that should have higher numbers, and so on and so on. When you emit your particles randomly (or with some logic) set an ID of the curve you want them to follow. You could then get closest location on each curve, and test if the curve ID is greater than the one it started on. If so then you could use some state machines to switch states. It's going to be a complex tree I think no matter what. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:10 PM, Cristobal Infante wrote: get closest location point-tangent. Use this as point velocity, I did something like this with several curves and it was fine. On 19 March 2015 at 16:52, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.com mailto:tekano@gmail.com wrote: closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com mailto:d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. Inline image 1 On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.be mailto:pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
I think you're mixing up software again! On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 5:27 PM, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com wrote: merge the curves, job done..
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
I hope the image gets through. this is what I get with closest location on group of curves, and combining the pointtangent as a force, as well as a force pulling towards the closest position – in order not to stray too far from the curve. particles get emitted from the curves in the center, and you see that here they follow the curves more closely, further out it does get more fuzzy – but they do follow the curves and they do branch automatically. I can see how this might not be precise enough compared to flow along curve. From: Rob Chapman Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 5:52 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: Crashing with unknown error message.
I've had that error before, and was something with arnold crashing, the alembic files were not really the cause of the error, and I only had it in the farm also, so maybe check your configuration for arnold on the farm, I can't remember exactly what was the culprit but it happened when I upgrade arnold. Here is also a thread that talks about this. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/exocortex-alembic/j4FhGcVaToU On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hopefully your geometry isn't that heavy... 1. Select the mesh. 2. Freeze Modeling (Make sure alembic topo op gets frozen) 3. Use the Animate Tools Plot Shape. 4. Delete Alembic PolyMesh Op off of the mesh. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 8:58 AM, Morten Bartholdy wrote: Hmm - does someone here know - is it possible to clone the alembic geometry and bake it to shapes, effectively making the geometry local in the scene? Morten Den 19. marts 2015 kl. 13:45 skrev Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl hirazib...@live.nl: This won't help you any, I'm afraid (sorry), but, if I am reading this correctly, this appears to be a known issue with Alembic: https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 Greetz Leendert -- Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
Re: Crashing with unknown error message.
Hopefully your geometry isn't that heavy... 1. Select the mesh. 2. Freeze Modeling (Make sure alembic topo op gets frozen) 3. Use the Animate Tools Plot Shape. 4. Delete Alembic PolyMesh Op off of the mesh. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 8:58 AM, Morten Bartholdy wrote: Hmm - does someone here know - is it possible to clone the alembic geometry and bake it to shapes, effectively making the geometry local in the scene? Morten Den 19. marts 2015 kl. 13:45 skrev Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl: This won't help you any, I'm afraid (sorry), but, if I am reading this correctly, this appears to be a known issue with Alembic: https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 Greetz Leendert -- Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
Is this processing time or hardware time? (disks, network, etc..) Of course saving gigabytes per frame is slow but may be a clever local SSD sync to the main server could do the job to make the process faster? jb On 19 Mar 2015, at 12:56, Ciaran Moloney moloney.cia...@gmail.com wrote: I'm loving working with Houdini, but sometimes it's just frustratingly slow. Even with the new VDB tools, converting and caching everything out as volume fields is a real drag. But then again the caching workflow is super-slick. I shudder at the thought of all the time lost to the mysteries of ICE caching. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com mailto:nagv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole there is a script for that mentality... there is a sop for that G
Re: Crashing with unknown error message.
Hmm - does someone here know - is it possible to clone the alembic geometry and bake it to shapes, effectively making the geometry local in the scene? Morten Den 19. marts 2015 kl. 13:45 skrev Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl: This won't help you any, I'm afraid (sorry), but, if I am reading this correctly, this appears to be a known issue with Alembic: https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 Greetz Leendert -- Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
Network and hardware are fastest I've used. It's just the nature of the work. Volume data in my case is not very large, only a few Mb per frame. But, e.g. to make useful collision fields from complex geometry often requires a good bit of SOPs pre-processing. I get the impression that much of SOPs is still not especially multithreaded. DOPs is also very slow vs solvers of comparable classes (FumeFX, Exocortex's Bullet, nCloth). But, that's generally OK since you can do so much, much more with DOPs with a very low chance of things failing apart as you scale up. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Is this processing time or hardware time? (disks, network, etc..) Of course saving gigabytes per frame is slow but may be a clever local SSD sync to the main server could do the job to make the process faster? jb On 19 Mar 2015, at 12:56, Ciaran Moloney moloney.cia...@gmail.com wrote: I'm loving working with Houdini, but sometimes it's just frustratingly slow. Even with the new VDB tools, converting and caching everything out as volume fields is a real drag. But then again the caching workflow is super-slick. I shudder at the thought of all the time lost to the mysteries of ICE caching. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole there is a script for that mentality... there is a sop for that G
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Nope. Doesn't work. On 3/19/2015 1:27 PM, Cristobal Infante wrote: merge the curves, job done..
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
get closest location point-tangent. Use this as point velocity, I did something like this with several curves and it was fine. On 19 March 2015 at 16:52, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.com wrote: closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [image: Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete r...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc. autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Like Rob said, you'll have to go the ID approach. If you know what particles should follow which curves its easy. If not, then you'll have to setup some logic. Create a custom param set on each curves named the same thing, like curveData. Then for each curve set a unique ID starting from 0. Main branch should be 0. Then the next branches off of that should have higher numbers, and so on and so on. When you emit your particles randomly (or with some logic) set an ID of the curve you want them to follow. You could then get closest location on each curve, and test if the curve ID is greater than the one it started on. If so then you could use some state machines to switch states. It's going to be a complex tree I think no matter what. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 1:10 PM, Cristobal Infante wrote: get closest location point-tangent. Use this as point velocity, I did something like this with several curves and it was fine. On 19 March 2015 at 16:52, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.com mailto:tekano@gmail.com wrote: closest location does not cut it when different curves overlap. you will have to build a system using a unique curve ID and translate along each curve ID's using curve u instead. at least this way you could gracefully hand over particles between curves as it reaches the end of each segment. On 19 March 2015 at 16:42, Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com mailto:d...@janimation.com wrote: Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. Inline image 1 On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.be mailto:pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be mailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force
Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
I think it was more of a statement of fact, not rain on parade. But if you want some more background information, Alain was originally hired at Softimage to work on motion capture systems, but later was promoted to team lead for the Games group for Softimage|3D. He wrote the original rendermap, 3D Paint/UV module, color reduction, many vertex color/polygon modeling tools for low level editing of meshes, and fixed a ton of bugs as he was one of the last to actively work on Softimage|3D code while everybody else was moved over to getting XSI v1.0 out the door. He did Softimage|3D v4.0 almost by himself. Needless to say, very talented and experienced lead now at Maxon. Also a consummate professional who I had the pleasure of dealing with many a time. Probably his best asset is his ability to put himself into the shoes of the customer and understand the impact a new tool or bug fix will have on the overall user experience, and prioritize accordingly. When you worked with Alain, you could always see measurable fruits of that labor in the next release/service pack. Matt Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 10:36:21 -0500 From: Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com Subject: Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com You don't have to rain on our imaginary parade Luc-Eric. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know about that 5k number; the potential Cinema4D/softimage overlap is probably around 1500 seats total. After SI|3D, Alain was working out of Japan in consulting and not directly on the XSI product; he contributed the older user normal editing tool that was in the netview.
Re: Crashing with unknown error message.
I see what you mean - that sucks cause I am on SiToA 2.8 :/ MB Den 19. marts 2015 kl. 14:57 skrev Oscar Juarez tridi.animei...@gmail.com: I've had that error before, and was something with arnold crashing, the alembic files were not really the cause of the error, and I only had it in the farm also, so maybe check your configuration for arnold on the farm, I can't remember exactly what was the culprit but it happened when I upgrade arnold. Here is also a thread that talks about this. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/exocortex-alembic/j4FhGcVaToU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/exocortex-alembic/j4FhGcVaToU On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hopefully your geometry isn't that heavy... 1. Select the mesh. 2. Freeze Modeling (Make sure alembic topo op gets frozen) 3. Use the Animate Tools Plot Shape. 4. Delete Alembic PolyMesh Op off of the mesh. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 8:58 AM, Morten Bartholdy wrote: Hmm - does someone here know - is it possible to clone the alembic geometry and bake it to shapes, effectively making the geometry local in the scene? Morten Den 19. marts 2015 kl. 13:45 skrev Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl mailto:hirazib...@live.nl : This won't help you any, I'm afraid (sorry), but, if I am reading this correctly, this appears to be a known issue with Alembic: https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 https://code.google.com/p/alembic/issues/detail?id=336 Greetz Leendert -- Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com http://si-community.com
ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Okay, these are the kind of things that make me want to run away from maya (video)
http://www.braverabbit.de/shapes/ I must accept this is a great solution to a common problem. (Anyone got ,at the first reading, what this sentence means? Let´s break it down): *I must accept - *since SI is EOL *this is a great solution - *speedy usual workflow on construction mode on SI *to a common -* which should be no problem on Maya *problem -* is a biggie, until the release of this tool. In addition: *These are the kind of things that make me want to run away from maya, since SI is* *EOL and speedy usual workflow on construction mode on SI, which should be no problem* *on Maya IS a big deal, until the release of this tool.* There, de-constructed. I´m getting Maya mentality. Yey. David.
RE: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk attachment: winmail.dat
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.be mailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. *From:* Dave Sisk mailto:d...@janimation.com *Sent:* Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
You don't have to rain on our imaginary parade Luc-Eric. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know about that 5k number; the potential Cinema4D/softimage overlap is probably around 1500 seats total. After SI|3D, Alain was working out of Japan in consulting and not directly on the XSI product; he contributed the older user normal editing tool that was in the netview. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Oliver Weingarten li...@pixelpanic.de wrote: ...maybe 15k potential users seems to be an inetresting amount for other companies than AD ;) ...fingers crossed somebody comes up with something coming even close to good old XSI..! Am 18.03.2015 um 16:27 schrieb Stephan Haitz: Could it be there are set free quite other energies with the EOL of Softimage than intented? Am 18.03.2015 um 14:24 schrieb Ed Harriss: Maxon… as in Maxon Cinema4D? If so, exciting! I’ve been using C4D and it’s got some really, really great stuff but there are a few areas that could use some Softimage style love. ;) Regardless, we are working on integrating it into our pipeline. Ed From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Greg Punchatz Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 9:14 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal Ex softie Alain Laferrière leading a new dev team :)
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. *From:* Dave Sisk d...@janimation.com *Sent:* Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk
Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry
Thanks for the responses guys. I've continued with my brute force method for now because it gets the job done. It involves several Select Case nodes with 29 cases each though, so you can imagine why I was reluctant to string that up. :) I've tried the suggested approach, but I usually get a jump to the same curve over and over again when they overlap instead of continuing along their first curve. [image: Inline image 1] On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Huh... works actually. I remember this not working before... carry on never mind. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:25 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote: Closest location doesn't work with curves fed in with a group. It always uses the first one. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 12:23 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Greg, any details about not getting it to work on curves? As far as I know, it should. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-bounces@ listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Your best bet is to create a mesh from those curves and transfer the curve's tangent onto the mesh as a vector attribute. Emit from the curve but use the geo's attribute to set the direction. How Paul Smith's hair grooming stuff works essentially. Using a group of curves or even doing one curve at a time won't get a nice smooth result I don't think. You'll probably get popping. Eric T. On 3/19/2015 11:48 AM, Greg Punchatz wrote: Dave has got something worked out, but its not ideal. He cannot get a group of curves to work, and is wiring up each one in by hand in the ICE tree. What he wants to do is emit an objects from one end of a curve and the have it follow the curve to the end.. but he wants to do this to a group of curves. He can make it work one curve at a time fine, he can wire the bizzilion curves up by hand but its not ideal. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:50 AM, pete...@skynet.bemailto:pete r...@skynet.be wrote: I think you can get the closest point on a group of curves, get the point-tangent from there and use that (vector) as a force, combine to taste with turbulence, and perhaps a force pulling towards the curve (vector from point to closest point) for extra control. adding/removing curves to the group is all you’d need to do to add them to the simulation. hope this helps. From: Dave Siskmailto:d...@janimation.com Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc. autodesk.com Subject: ICE emit particles and follow branching geometry Hi, I'm trying to create an effect with particles flowing from one several ends of branching geometry to another of several ends on the same geometry. Right now I'm working with Flow Along Curve and a bunch of partially-overlapping curves that go from one end to the other, but since ICE is pretty limited in what you can plug a geometry port into, I'm running into a LOT of duplication that makes adding or removing curves a labor intensive process. Is there another approach to this I should be trying? Thanks, Dave Sisk