Kristinka Hair C - Set of ICE nodes for hair creation in Softimage

Features: 

- Hair styling that always consider whole shape of hair. User can do styling in a fraction of time, compared to classic hair systems.
- Styling works well for short and for long hair.
- Unlimited hair length. 
- Styling by loft cross sections, or by following the NURBS surfaces.
- Automatic generation of details, but always with full controll. Locks, clumps, curls, turbulence, are created by ICE compounds.
- Additional modifiers, like cutting hairs by external geometry, constant strand length for keyframe animation, resampling and subdividing strands, 
  morphing with another hair, modulating hair distribution over emitter, so user can increase density on most visible areas.
- Full support for ICE simulation engines, for now, it's for Phil Taylor's Strand Dynamics Framework, Helge Mathee's Strand Dynamics.
- Support for simulation with Syflex/SI Cloth, by using ICE strand extrusion from Helge Mathee's MT_Strands addon.


In order to work, MT_Strands addon should be installed. You can download it here:
http://217.160.138.15/helge/ice/ice_tutorials_part1.zip 
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.

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. 
Suggested usage is take tour through models, or just to try to adapt existing setups to your characters.


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, it's 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 on other versions too.


A 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 in desired ICE tree.
- you can always replace geometries, used as inputs for ICE operators
- if you need to rename models with ICE pointclouds 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 changed with model's name sometimes - at least this is my experience with 7.01.

Of course, I can't be responsible in any way, for anything that this pack may cause to your hardware or software.


Good Luck :)


Best Regrads,

Anto Matkovic
anto@matkovic.com

