i want to use ICE to make a swarm animation of images and .txt files residing in a certain dir on the HD. My goal is that the images and text fly in and settle well ordered on a matrix, while deforming during the animation.
The features are:
a) the objects of the images and text, first have their full aspect ratio, and then start deforming to a square of a certain size before settling
b) the long side od the texture should crop off rather than texture being deformed.
c) same with text objects
d) I use a file name convention that defines in which field of the matrix the object goes, and in which order it lines up there. Which also is the order of the objects starting their animation after another, but with a random factor.
I’m totally not good at ICE, but open to follow all steps to be taken and learn through this task. Can someone take me by the hand on this ? I’m on limited budget, but happy to pull out compensation for your help. It'd be great to work over TeamViewer remote desktop app.
My friend Nika Ragua created the ICE Gallery Animator with me. He did all ICE coding. Unfortunately Nika is busy away from keyboard for a while and I still need to repair 2 last things:
1. when I change the number of Rows and Columns, the Animations becomes unordered.
2. The textures have yet to manually be dragged in the Material Manager, and then assigned them right … description here. This a bit complex task should be automated by just pointing to a folder with the images, and that’s it.
Its not necessary to tewak the big_pointcloud. Only the CONTROL_Pointcloud is of interest at this time.
Would be awesome if an ICE man can have a look and help finalizing the free for everybody to enjoy ICE Gallery Animator.
then take the Image-Lookup node of the respective pointclouds render tree, delete tex if there, and new-from-file the gallery-sequence
in the image-sequence node set ID as Time Source
so i select the respective material in the material manager, then i type the respective pointcloud in the script and run http://files.2he.com/uploads2/2014_03_25_22_19_40.jpg
do for every gallery
Script :
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
#get the array of ImageClips from selection and initializing the array
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
#store the array of ratio values in custom parameter to read it in ICE
print aspect_ratio_array
#Application.SIAddCustomParameter("big_pointcloud", "AspectRatioArray", "siString", "", 0, 1, "", 4, 0, 1, "", "")
Application.SetValue("big_pointcloud.CustomPSet.AspectRatioArray",str(aspect_ratio_array), "")
can’t use .png, SI can’t read them and script cant determine the AR then
so you need to use .jpg
if the gallery has new pictures, the app needs to re-read the file dimensions with the script (that is in the LIB dir of the app)
load the script (or copy paste)
use an array name for the respective pointcloud http://files.2he.com/uploads2/2014_04_05_12_56_02.jpg
select the pictures of the respective sequence (not the sequence itself) for that pointcloud
run script
redo for each pointcloud
NOTE its not the pointcloud that holds the material, its the respective reference object of each pointcloud that holds the material http://files.2he.com/uploads2/2014_04_05_13_05_16.jpg
Frank1000 wrote:1. when I change the number of Rows and Columns, the Animations becomes unordered.
2. The textures have yet to manually be dragged in the Material Manager, and then assigned them right … description here. This a bit complex task should be automated by just pointing to a folder with the images, and that’s it.
For #1, how about starting from scratch with the desired Rows Columns from the start?
ok cool, thank you
the logic of the Gallery Animator is:
* a reference poly is the source for the particles
* it is translated along a curve
* the material has a transparency ani
* a reference grid with sub-grid is defined
* each cell is the goal for the particles
* at the beginning of ani, the poly’s shape is amended to match the aspect ratio of its respective texture
* at the end of ani the poly has its own original shape
* thereby the texture is being cropped, the texture-support is ICE animated accordingly
* the overall speed of animations can be altered to match a certain frame number to finish the gallery animation
The remaining goals are :
1. Eliminating the current flow order failure
2. Pointing to a picture dir (any mixed picture names ok) for ICE to fetch the pictures alphabetically. If there is less pictures than grid cells, the ICE already repeats the last picture.
Unfortunately I can’t reach Nika these days, he knows the ICE stuff, I did the concept of the Gallery Animator.
I’m happy to connect via google hangout for chat / audio / screenshare
only during football world championship games i'm afk
Hi Bullit,
I have a question i can't solve with the Gallery Animator,
With the ICE controlled texture support ani, when I clear the Aspect Ratio (AR) cache of the texture sequence in the "big_pointcloud" http://files.panodome.com/uploads01/2014-10-22---18-25-03.jpg , the pictures are not being cropped any more but squeezed.
http://files.panodome.com/uploads01/2014-10-22---13-09-20.jpg
Now when I run the script_python.txt to determine and cache their AR of the texture sequence again, the distortion of the textures goes away, but they are not cropped right either. What I get is texture repeatings instead of cropping in to the shorter length (either x or y) http://files.panodome.com/uploads01/2014-10-22---13-09-20.jpg
I didn't find out how to prevent the working scene from changing to repeating textures, when i need to delete the existing textures and load new ones.
I also tried to rename the textures so they sort alphabetically in Softimage Material Manager, before running the script on them.
If you could have a look, would be mega great, since i'm not good at ICE.
thx Bullit.
I've ran the script with other images and the textures of the loaded texture-sequence distorted as expected.
I selected the original, accordingtextures and ran the script again, and it updated the cache correctly. The textures rendered un-distorted again.
Seems that the cache then is updating just fine.
Not sure why the new textures of GALLERY_ANI_02 are not catching it. 2 Ideas :
1) There is a problem with using 180 textures in the new run, instead of 181 in the old run. Though i only need 180.
2) the order in which the cache is created with the ARs of the textures, is not aligning to the order they are distributed over the particle instances.
I have checked loading and using the 181 textures but it still gives me the texture repetition on the object inste ad of changing the shape of the texture support or UV points (not sure what the compund actually makes use of).
Regarding the disconnection of the ICE tree, where should i disconnect it exacty ? Not sure.
