to set the fragment color you can use something like this:
and to set the depth based on the alpha use something like :

Thanks everyone,
the main reason i uploaded this compound is that
it works on curved surfaces (torus) as well as it does
on planar ones (grid).

from the the few render tests i did,
i would say that strands have a slight advantage

Let me show you with a screenshot... What I mean is: instead of using a single mesh as instancing shape, you can use a group and randomly pick the meshes for instancing. The problem is that with your plugin I can only select the cube, sphere or cylinder to create a polymesh, but not the whole group...

Squizmek wrote:hey nassosy,
do you think it would be possible to take a group of instancing meshes instead of a single mesh that gets duplicated? This would be really awesome to get an exact copy of the pointcloud as geometry!

I don't understand the question.

You can always use Particle instancing instead of PolyMeshDuplicator ;)

Each duplicate uses the SRT/Transform matrix of the particle whose ID matches its CopyID If no particle exists, the SRT of the duplicate is random/undefined (you will usually get garbage). So always make sure there are as many particles as duplicates When the # of (born) Particles >= # of Duplicates...

Solved it by copying the "StrandColor" to a custom color ICE attribute and using that in the RenderTree

Yes in 7.01 both attributes work,
2010 sp1 is another story

So be it then.
In my XSI 7.01 x64 winXP, it works without problems though.

Make a shader assign it to the point cloud in the Render Tree/Material editor add a "Color Attribute" node to you material set it to "Color" or "StrandColor" and connect its output to the diffuse input of your illumination shader (phong, blinn, contant, etc) Unfortunate...

The whole point of me asking you so many questions
was to see if it works WITHOUT having to delete anything

well, does it? (even if it gives you error messages)

it works then

or the previous line?

error messages usually look like this:
' ERROR : 21000 - Unspecified failure - [line 90 in C:\users\Administrator\Softimage\XSI_7.01\Addons\PolyMeshDuplicator\Application\Plugins\ApplyPolyMeshDuplicator.vbs]
' ERROR : 21000-CUST-ApplyPolyMeshDuplicator - Unspecified failure

It either couldn't load the plugin,
or couldn't load the ICE compound.

in the later case, open the ICE tree
open the Preset Manager and update the list
by pressing the recycle button

could you post the whole line of the error?
it usually prints the line number of the file where it encountered the error

EDIT : Maybe you need to try to detect typical version of XSI because PolymeshDuplicator.xsiaddon doesn't install for me because of the x32.dll Didn't install or didn't load? Because if it didn't install you wouldn't get the following error: ERROR : 2360 - This plug-in is not compatible with the cu...