Hey everyone,

I wanted to share some of my compounds here, which I recently posted on my blog. I really tried to make them work as flawless as possible but let me know if you have any issues or ideas for improvement.

Cluster to Weightmap

As the name implies it converts clusters to weightmaps. Whats nice though is that it accept all types of clusters (point,polygon,edge) and adds the ability to grow and/or smooth the resulting weightmap.
Remember that you have to create the weightmap before you create the Icetree to make this work.




Cluster to Weightmap

Create Copies along Curve

I don’t think there is an easy way to do this with the build-in topology compounds plus it has some other nice features:

• supports both open and closed curves
• nice controls to interactively position, scale and rotate your copies on the curve
• copies will be evenly spaced along the curve
• the copies nicely align to the curve, you shouldn’t run into any problems with flipping normals on s-shaped curves.
• transfers UV’s

Create copies along curve

Neural Net

Another take on motiongraphics currently most popular effect: emits particles and connects them with strands. This one is

• pretty fast
• works both in a simulated and non-simulated environment
• two modes of stand creation: closest points & random
• turbulice and grow the strands

Here is a quick viewport capture of 750 particles being emited per second, each growing 30 connections to its neighbours:


Neural Net

Emit from Polygons

This compound is thought to be used in a non-simulated environment and the emitter mesh should ideally consist of quads only. The idea behind this compound was to quickly create coral like structures by emitting instances from polygon centers and scaling them according to the polygon they’ve been emited from. This helps to prevent instances from penetrating each other, and also results in a more natural, organic look. A more detailed explanation of the various parameters can be found on my blog...



Emit from Polygons

Quantize Values

This one is a bit techy, but proved useful to me. It takes a set or array of scalar values and spits out quantized values based on a quantization step. An image (hopefully) explains more than thousand words



Quantize Values

Have fun!

Neural Net looks awesome, thank you!

Still trying to pack everything into one post...

There is a problem with Neural Net compound, - Number of Particles per Second rate type doesn't work on simulation or modeling stack

You have to activate "time varying", otherwise all partices are emitted on the same spot. It works the same way in the normal "Emit from geometry" node, only that it's on there by default...

Yes, it's not checked by default, I haven't noticed this. Thanks again!

the "Create Copies along Curve" rocks and i was trying to do something similar the last days - it works but your is much more smooth!
have you tried making a strand version? same thing that you can do with that compound, but with strands made out of a curve.

Hi Felix,

Kudos again for sharing these again. They're a great addon (pun intended) to the ICE tools.

rob

Great stuff as always!

Thanks Mossman.