a few situations I remember where I found ICE to be an unexpected lifesaver: - Recreating these cartoon characters for a series – there were certain handdrawn traits in the concept art, to evoke certain materials. There was no straightforward 3D solution, not possible to model or rig it, the usual fur and particles was totally inappropriate for this, it ended up not looking good and creating rendertime overhead - and there was a hundred or so shots to do with up to 5 characters. Roto-drawing (which the studio is experienced in ) the traits on top of the rendered animation was considered but not feasible for the time and budget. The client was ready to abandon it in order to get the production out of the door. Using ICE I could generate those traits dynamically on the animated characters, respecting the way they were drawn in the concepts, with temporal consistency, and by transferring certain attributes from the surface to shaders I could seamlessly blend them with the underlying surface – and it’s very particular cartoony look. Several weeks worth of estimated manual labor, which would also totally screw the shot’s workflow, ended up being a single evening for making an ICE setup – copy and paste onto a few bodyparts on the characters – done. Thanks to reference models and the passes system, not a single thing had to be done per shot - all of which were already broken out and set up for rendering. The next iteration of the renders had the drawn traits at no extra cost. The producer didn’t understand how we had managed to get all the work done – thought we’d outsourced it to asia overnight. - I had to create this videowall/set (a grid of cubes and lights) that was dynamically changing. The idea was to have this set come alive, reacting to a videoclip – cubes rotation and scaling - doing waves and transitions and what not – only, there was no clip, no timing, nothing. I ended up generating and animating it in ICE, with states, probabilities, some logic nodes, driven with a handfull of nulls for different events. The whole thing non destructive, the timing totally adaptable. What looked like a week of work to animate at least (a 5 minute sequence) and involving some complex setups, and was going to be totally unflexible, doing carefully timed and offset keyframes on hundreds of nulls – took just a day and a half – and could be extended upon on a whim. I was kind of sad when it was over – as I found I only scratched the surface of what could be done. - I had to visualise a complex scenic setup - think of holographic projections, made up of suspended chains of ledlights – each on a rig – interacting with water - representing “ghosts” – all doing a choreography. After thinking a bit of some shortcuts to illustrate the concept - which was all the client really needed - I ended up generating the whole thing “as is” – in ICE of course. Every single led as a capsule particle, it’s light turning on or off – hundreds of chains, many thousands of leds – driven by volumes. I could even easily change the resolution of the whole system – to see how detailed the holographic image was going to be. How many LEDs would be needed and how much detail could be represented with them. Another of those “this is going to take so much time to do in 3D” setups that ends up being very simple in ICE.
Oh – sorry for digressing – just need bullet points. “Complex interactive and dynamic, technical, procedural setups, done in a fraction of the time, requiring no TD skills” That’s what ICE is for me. Particles, FX - that’s only scratching the surface of it – it’s applications are everywhere. From: Toonafish Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 3:20 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: What use is ICE really? Ha ! I was just thinking Paul should post his ICE renderer video :-) - Ronald On 3/21/2014 15:02, p...@bustykelp.com wrote: Some of my stuff Making a renderer https://vimeo.com/20648346 remapping topology https://vimeo.com/43532240 transferring deformation to different topology https://vimeo.com/26116783 image manipulation https://vimeo.com/33588786 texture instance flow https://vimeo.com/37304814 facial mocap solver https://vimeo.com/40589904 muscles https://vimeo.com/43913057 applying corrective shapes https://vimeo.com/67402407 space invaders https://vimeo.com/75699841 tree maker https://vimeo.com/76144838 forest maker https://vimeo.com/76411577 fur system https://vimeo.com/80382153 anatomical deformation https://vimeo.com/88245138
