Thanks guys for your answers. That pretty much confirms my suspicions about locations in ICE. Oh well, hopefully I can make it to the next beta and make a few suggestions.
Another approach that would serve the same purpose in some cases is to be able to use texturing UVs to drive the location. Kinda like a UV to Location but for polygons. Beating a dead horse for sure but this stuff is so mysterious I can't help wondering... On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 4:18 AM, Ahmidou Lyazidi <ahmidou....@gmail.com>wrote: > Being able to store them as static ice atttribute and eventuallycache them > would be usefull too ! > I'm also curious about why we don't have a deeper access to locations, > could some SI dev elaborate about that? > Is there still rooms for improvement? > > Cheers. > > ----------------------------------------------- > Ahmidou Lyazidi > Director | TD | CG artist > http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos > http://www.cappuccino-films.com > > > 2013/6/12 Vladimir Jankijevic <vladi...@elefantstudios.ch> > >> +100 >> It would be great to have access to this data. The ability to build my >> own locations would be useful sometimes :) >> It's a shame we haven't seen any development in that area :( >> >> >> On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 1:37 AM, Raffaele Fragapane < >> raffsxsil...@googlemail.com> wrote: >> >>> locators are more or less that, barycentric coordinates coupled with a >>> facet index kinda thing. >>> Why they are not exposed atomically isn't 100% clear. It might be some >>> eval issues with those atoms if they were to be exposed, just lack of >>> foresight in the implementation somewhere back then, simply something >>> missing that might one day come, or they might look up additional data of >>> sorts (accelstruct?) and can't be decoupled from that. >>> >>> Regardless, they can't be cracked open that I know of, not to read from >>> them more granular-ly, nor to write directly into or over one. >>> >>> >>> On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Vincent Fortin <vfor...@gmail.com>wrote: >>> >>>> Figured I'd start a new thread. This has been arousing my curiosity for >>>> a while and I need your wisdom :-) >>>> >>>> In Houdini I build locations by providing a polygon index and what is >>>> called a "uv parametric location". The term uv is misleading here. All it >>>> is, is a coordinate on each polygon plane. >>>> >>>> Softimage's sdk calls it "subtriangle barycentric weights". So along >>>> with the polygon index and the vertex indices I managed to build my >>>> location in python. I didn't test this thoroughly but I seem to be getting >>>> an equivalent to what I'm used to in Houdini. >>>> >>>> With regard to recreate this in ICE: >>>> 1) Do we have access to the necessary data? (that is, polygon index, >>>> subtriangle indices and the normalized weights on the triangle?) >>>> 2) How would we go about assembling it? >>>> >>>> I understand this all sounds a bit abstract. Like everyone I use >>>> locations a lot in ICE, they're amazing and manipulating them is easy. >>>> Maybe there is no need for exposing lower-level functionalities. >>>> I'm merely experimenting here to see how far I can push them. An >>>> example would be to access those barycentric coordinates and, say, slide a >>>> particle on a polygon without having to resort to the Get Closest Location >>>> node. >>>> >>>> Thoughts? >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it >>> and let them flee like the dogs they are! >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> --------------------------------------- >> Vladimir Jankijevic >> Technical Direction >> >> Elefant Studios AG >> Lessingstrasse 15 >> CH-8002 Zürich >> >> +41 44 500 48 20 >> >> www.elefantstudios.ch >> --------------------------------------- >> > >
