Hi all

I would like to announce the new version of my ICE nodes for hair creation. I hope I'll release this one, together with samples, to the end of this month. It will be free.
What you can see there, it's a pure simulation (no key framing and such) with Phil Taylor's Strand Dynamics nodes. For now it's a bit rough, I did hair volume with simple and fast effects, by varying offsets of collision to surface. Also I'll have to find some way for friction...



Watch FLV movie

So for now, some new features are:

- 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

... and more.

The new version is fairly more complex than old one, it always using at least two point clouds. On the other side, basic setup is using just one NURBS surface, so it should be easy to adapt existing setups to your models.
I'll add ready-to-use samples too.


Some compounds are using hard-coded nodes from MT_Strands Addon, so in the meantime, go for it:
http://217.160.138.15/helge/ice/ice_tutorials_part1.zip

Cheers

That´s some awesome piece of work you got there, isn´t it?

It amazes me, what people like you are getting out of ICE. Keep it up!

And btw: Thanks for making this one available to the public for free. I couldn´t stress it enough, that this is generosity i´d love to see more often from bigger companies...

Thank You,

Actually, there are a lot of nodes from Phil Pack there. Also Helge Mathee made a few hard coded, fast nodes. Someone just needed to finish the puzzle. On the other side, it seems that hair stuff just likes the simple, fast math, because of performance. So maybe it isn't challenge for programming students, as a people who may be interested in doing such things, it's too simple.
By the way, there are many free solutions like this one on Houdini forums, I don't even need to talk about Blender community, so we can also have some

Looks amazing! Looking forward to this release!!!

Just watched the flv... holy sh.., that's really impressive, great work !

So it's there.

In order to work, MT_Strands addon should be installed. It's here: http://217.160.138.15/helge/ice/ice_tutorials_part1.zip.
edit: the link above seems to be down, but you can still get it here - HB
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.


Good Luck

Download it (about 20MB) from:http://www.matkovic.com/anto/kristinka-hair-c-29aug09.rar

Great work Mathaeus..!!

Thank´s very much for sharing this to the community...! We´ll put into the upload section very soon..!!
Hope, we will see some cool hair-sim using your suite in the near future..!

cheers,
oliver

Well you can do whatever you like whit it

Actually I've tried to convince my fellows, game programmers, for some well organized plugin, so users can do everything just by picking sessions. No big deal for them to do that, but, because it's free project in their free time, it seems that development will take forever. On the other side, even on a huge market of 3dsMax, commercial hair plugins aren't so frequent, nicely to say.

Maybe people can find these setups even more harder to figure out, than original nodes from PhilPack, but it seems that's a price of traveling from spheres-with-cubes samples, to something that looking believable. There are a lot of decissions and compromises to do, and that part takes a *lot* of time. I hope these nodes can help the others in their ways from 'spheres to life'.

Beside movie from first post, I've used Strand Dynamics from PhilPack in a few small TV commercials, not just for human hair, but the same compounds were used. So, it is 'production proven' - even with a really brutal deadlines of small TV productions. ICE strand dynamics is fast, verlet 'wave movement' looking nice, also, what is really important, I've been able to serve the taste of art directors: "great, now just remove big one from left corner, then put some of these small ones in the front" .

For transferring Syflex/SI Cloth simulation to hairs, well there I'm not optimist, whatever way is used, ICE way, non ICE way.... Even it's 'real' simulation, it's much harder to control it after.

A few details about movie: it's rendered on QuadCore with 32bit OS, rendering time is about 50 seconds per frame. Of course it's rasterizer with full 3d motion blur, no any secondary ray. There is one light with volumic shadows, which flickers from time to tome - because I tried to pass out with directional light, only with 1024 shadow map. Shader is pHairTK together with Dirtmap for environment look up (Dirtmap was in 'environment only' mode). There are about 9k hairs, each with 60 segments. Hair has a different density, much more where it splits (that option is built in compounds).
Subsurface for human body is an ICE vertex color shader, a bit improved version of this one: http://community.softimage.com/forum/autodesk-softimage/ice---interactive-creative-environment/yet-another-realtime-sss/

Cheers

That's some pretty impressive stuff you got going there Mathaeus. I would really like to give this a try but I'm way too busy.
Maybe you could put up a small Tutorial/Demonstration in the new ICE section to give people a starting point and get them excited about it . =)

Actually, I think it would be better to do already requested 'grassland out of strand that can wave in the wind'. Basically it's the same stuff. This time, just for sake of figuring out how ICE strands works, we will start from scratch, from Generate Sample Set node, then step by step, to procedurally animated field of grass. Together with simple trickery, how to blend strands, how to cut grass, how to do grouping, what is possible to do with function curves, and so on.

So if it's a good idea, I hope I'll post field of grass tutorial this weekend, at least the first, basic part.

Cheers