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Hi all,

playing a bit with Helge Mathee's strand nodes. This one creates the strands that follows NURBS surface, from single point cloud. I hope I'll post compound in a few days, just need to polish it. Of course, if anyone is interested

goddammit! thats awesome... i need to study ice more ; ;
well done man.. hope you release the compound soon!
much appreciated

The Master of Strands strikes again!
Frankly impressive work, congrats!

...cool stuff man..! ICE ist simply the best ;) Looking forward to your "knit-o-matic" compound...!!

best regards,
oliver

amanzing!

looks great. good job

That looks awesome! Fantastic stuff!

Nice work!

Thank you guys

I've uploaded XSI model with whole setup. Usage is simple as it can be, it's just an empty point cloud with unsimulated tree, compound and NURBS surface. Here is a map of 'unusual' parameters.

Cheers

That is just sooo awesome...right time for it, as i have to do some furniture that incorporates braided rattan surfaces...great stuff

I´ll show some of it, when it comes out as i want it to ;)

woooooow..fantastic job..man..!!!

Thanks Mathaeus..!

I´ve put it into the downloadsection:

viewtopic.php?f=39&t=84

cherers,
oliver

Hello Mathaeus,

first of all very well done

but lets make this a different kind of post I'm curious what made you come up with this as the idea to develop into a compound.

and what challenges did you face along the way?

Cheers
Terry

Letterbox wrote: but lets make this a different kind of post I'm curious what made you come up with this as the idea to develop into a compound.

It's adaptation of my existing compounds for creating a human hair, so basic idea was hair creation. By the way, it's all very simple math behind.
In the past, I did a lot of polygon hairs as a game artist - everything of that that was recognized as good, had some kind of rigging or modeling stack behind. For hairs, fur, fish scales, cities, woven furniture, all that stuff that has recognizable flow, but also a lot of small details, I think it's proper way to use the mix of procedural and hand modeling. In my opinion, making all these details isn't job for human hand.
ICE, especially unsimulated ICE trees, seems to be a right tool - it's easy to combine creation by hand and procedurals, also there is always choice to use canned toolbars, or to change everything at will.

Woven furniture idea isn't new, I tried to do exactly the same a long time ago with loops in POV-Ray, this trial is still live: http://www.irtc.org/irtc/irtc?_n&pg=Vie ... ptwife.jpg. Please don't laugh , it's twelve years old image.

Letterbox wrote: and what challenges did you face along the way?

As usually with Softimage, lack of 'simple examples'. Mentioned POV-Ray had about five hundred of code examples with it, all focused on artist creation. On the other side, Softimage examples looks like more a programmer's show reel - before few years I had a hard time to figure out that I don't need SCOPs for my rigging needs, even more, rig without SCOPs became faster...
So this time I started to build my own examples, step by step. Hopefully, the old Sofitmage.net had enough work from other people, easy to understand, because a lot of these were created by beginners. After Helge Mathee released his strand nodes, finally I had the ground to build my own stuff over.

Actually I didn't laugh, more i looked at the ram that you had back then, and look at whats needed today ! Can you even get vista or xp with 64mb working???

I'd heard of Paint shop pro, and was told it was an excellent alternative to PS, pity its not around as it once was. I tried the corel, but not for me.

It's also nice to see --someone-- is still using nurbs.. The more i use them the better i like them, and some things just work so well, i only wish one day they'd upgrade the whole nurbs package.



I must say that the hardest thing for me, the lack of examples, even with those excellent Helgee ones, the type etc... is the utter lack of docs or explanation and scenes covering the different options in a clear way, I wonder if thats why he has problems with people "not getting it". For me an overview pdf should have been written, that's is much more a this is the design strategy, this is what and where things go, eg this is why there's unsim and sim, strands, volume, etc, and this is the logic and reasoning behind it, and why you'd need it, and for what solutions you use it for.

From my (and this is all from my perspective) that you have to spend a serious amount of time digging and testing (and RBD's seem hardly touched)... which is always hard not only because it laborious, but the time it takes, mainly the problems always come down to time constraints and docs.

The thing i do like about ice, is that in some ways its a very simplified way of making things 'open source' of sorts that allow you to 'investigate' compounds and rewire them. Like the pages you pointed me to before. They were understood, but "freezing" was not a option, as one curve was dependent on another and so on so if one manipulated the first all get done thru the chain. But because of the openness of ice, it did allow me to re-wire to suit the job. That solution, was excellent, as it was fast, and simple to do, probably impossible else where and it got the job done.

But it nice to hear that you too found some of the same problems, I think that gives hope to some of us. (specifically me )

PS Thanks for taking the time to reply to it all.

PPS Looking forward to seeing what else you are going to dig up from the past

Cheers
Terry

Letterbox wrote: It's also nice to see --someone-- is still using nurbs.. The more i use them the better i like them, and some things just work so well, i only wish one day they'd upgrade the whole nurbs package.

Well, for now, NURBS surfaces are only choice for creating such compounds in ICE, at least in an easy way. Actually I'm using meshes as control objects, whenever the NURBS surface is complex. Perhaps everyone knows procedure for that, anyway here is again:

- select NURBS surface, go to model > Create > PolyMesh > Nurbs To Mesh
- in PPG, choose, From Control Hull: On, Stitch: Off
- freeze newly created mesh
- select NURBS surface, go to animate panel, go to Shape> select shape key, select your mesh.

Now the NURBS surface will stick to mesh, so it's possible to use mesh modeling tools, raycast selections, so on.
Procedure will work only with opened NURBS surfaces, both in U and V. Mesh and NURBS surface should stay with same number of points all the time.