direct download can be found here: http://www.si-community.com/download/co ... 9aug09.rar
Watch FLV movie
Features:
support for strand dynamics from Phil Pack
- support for strand dynamics from MT_Strands Addon
- support for Syflex dynamics, by using mesh strips, generated with MT_Strands Addon
- blending with static point cloud, so you can simulate just a part of hair
- blending (morphing) with another point cloud
- smooth subdivision of strands, after simulation
- constant strand length, without simulation, so you can do believable keyframed animation
- cutting hairs by geometry - any geometry, not just planes
- a few new deformers
- compatibility with factory nodes for deforming strands, such as bend or turbulize
- sharper curve interpolation, also Hermite (through control points) interpolation as an option
In order to work, MT_Strands addon should be installed. It's here.
Not the all compounds needs that addon, but some important compounds for resampling rely on MT_Strands_Fitting node, also setups for Syflex/SI Cloth needs ICE strands extrusion.
Now it's a bunch of Softimage's models, every of them trying to explain some of features. Instead of classic documentation, I've added a lot of comments together with models. Complete setup from previous post's movie is there too - everything except female model. So, suggested usage is to take tour through models, or just to try to adapt existing setups to your characters.
This time, hair rig always consist at least two point clouds. Main for hair guides, this one is styled or simulated. Another is a high resolution hair for rendering, which is just interpolated over guides, but also can carry the strand modifiers. From styling stuff, there is a new, 'Follow NURBS' modifier, that forces strands to follow NURBS surface. So now it's possible to do more complex styling, such as braids or tiny hair layers over character's body. It can work together with default, 'cross section' controllers.For Syflex/SI Cloth, there is only setup for transferring deformations. ICE Simulation setups should play their simulations as soon as you import XSI model and playback the scene.
NURBS surfaces are almost everywhere in this hair rig, together with slightly forgotten NURBS terminology. Reparameterize, fit, swap UVs... On the other side, no one of these setups requires weight maps or tangents maps, also controllers doesn't rely on topology anymore.
Setups were heavy tested on a few 7.01 versions, I think they should work nicely with other versions too.
At the end, a few tips that everyone knows, but anyway:
- with ICE, you can copy/paste ICE trees between different scenes. Exactly, you can open another scene, copy ICE compounds, close that scene and open new one, then paste compounds into desired ICE tree.
- you can always replace geometries, used as inputs for ICE operators
- if you need to rename models with ICE point clouds inside, do that only inside XSI scene, don't rename them in Windows explorer, don't rename them when exporting. ICE can use generic, 'This_Model' keyword, but this can be replaced by model's
name sometimes - at least that's my experience with 7.01.
For further infos just check this thread.
An update now has finally found it's way
to this thread too: Go to this post -HB
