emPolygonizer - metaballs for SOFTIMAGE

[Qwesto]

That's a nice piece you have there
I first couldn't believe it (00).

Great tool!

...Guinea-Germany-Irish-Frisian over here

[Firebird]

Great stuff
Good job on the hole em_ series ^^
Can´t wait to try it with a few SPH tests

[Letterbox]

emTree? Huh, what's that? Never heard of it before. Gee, I wonder what that could/will be

PS: emPolygonize is a 100% compatible with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and Win95 (beta), don't worry

emTree, whats that, I just said Tree...

I'm gutted no DOS version...

How did that code from OpenEXR work out for you... or is that on the backburner?

PS I like the way you offer a deal on the two so far, I hope you'll continue that strategy ;)

Cheers
Terry

[Mootzoid]

Okay, you got me ;)
emTree also is a custom operator to produce complex and organic looking polygon meshes. It will be presented at the German XSI user meeting in september. The name "emTree" does not refer to the tree in your backyard, it actually means a "tree" like for instance in "binary tree", more a computer science thing, if you know what I mean. Interestingly these two "trees" have quite much in common

But there's much to code, guess I will be the pale computer freak this summer

[schyzomaniac]

This looks freakin' amazing! Sweet!
If this gonna end up in the same price range as your other plugins, call me "sold". ;)

Fantasic to see you expanding Softimage with really, really usefull plugins.

Thanks so much for your dedication and hard work.

cheers,
Daniel

[Mootzoid]

@-Daniel-the-Schyzomaniac
yes, don't worry, the "price-performance ration" will be good ;) A little higher than the others though...

[schyzomaniac]

I can definetly life with "a little" higher.
Also, I can imagine it must be harder to code something that calculates/creates new polygons, instead of manipulating something, that is already there (fluids/particles). At least it sounds more difficult to me.

Love your pointCloudRender so far, but still didn't have time to test the fluid plugin. Soon though!!

cheers,
Daniel

[Hirazi Blue]

While I'm all for a quick release (if the price... oh no, we already dealt with that ), I was wondering if it weren't prudent to wait until after the release of the inevitably upcoming Softimage 2010 (Siggraph 09 would seem to be a safe bet ), as this could possibly mean you'd have to recode some of your operator then anyway???

[Tekano]

Hi Owei

this looks promising - finally a metaballs mesh solver that works with ICE. I'm a little concerned, it still looks very similar to the default blobs output that is built in with Softimage ICE particles at the moment. Are there any plans to advance the surface mesh solution? Michele Sandroni's excellent metaballs plugin (which sadly does not work with ICE) had various options for surface blending eg:-

Volumes (bounded)
Metaballs (Hyperbolic)
Inverse (exponential)

all of these with an 'isovalue' which could shrink or grow the mesh around the generators. There were also post processing filters for accuracy, tolerance and smoothing - all of this added up to a really great 'mesher' for doing liquid type surfaces. This is the problem with the existing SI built in solution - it looks too, well , 'blobby'

cheers

Rob

[Mootzoid]

@Hirazi Blue

... I was wondering if it weren't prudent to wait until after the release of the inevitably upcoming Softimage 2010 ...

Naw, there's really no need to wait for the release of Softimage 2010, really. I have quite some experience with "new versions of XSI" and it usually only takes a quick re-compile of the plug-in. 10 Minutes work, no big deal.

[Mootzoid]

@Tekano:

Isolevel Sliders and other stuff is included. This is only version 1.0, which means that there is more to come, a lot more!

...just wait for the demo version ;-)

cheers,
Eric

[origin]

Hi mootz,
that's looking good so far.
Can you elaborate on speed of your plugin ?
For example comparing to pwrapper which is ridiculous slow when meshing >>1000 particles.

[janimatic]

Hello all,

it's fantastic Eric,

i just need this for my next job, just in time as usual...
I'd need to do extensive testing during July though

sph emFluids fft ocean and now a mesher.. Softimage is really starting to rock with fluids... thanks to you guys

i would also like to know about curvature control, passing attributes , performances...

best regards
Julien

PS
also it would be nice to have solution for transfering animated topology to xsi 6.5 as our renderfarm isn't converted to 7 yet. Something cleaner than obj sequence with visibility switches.. like true fast operator reading from a cache compatible with your mesher

[owei]

Hi there..!
I´ve just tweaked the first anim to this result. I cranked up the resolution and the iso-field-blur so we get this less blobby look at least...

[flvprev]http://www.si-community.com/download/cl ... gonizer_HR[/flvprev]

@origin
...well, performance extremely depends on the level of detail and the post-iso-field operations. emPolygonizer deals quite fast with at least several thousands particles . The test-scene above runs between 15 fps (low detail) and 0,5 fps (hight detail shown above) with 15k cached particles ;)

@janimatic
As Eric built up this emPolygonizer-version as a framework, which for now is running with a basic marching cubes algorithm, it will be easy to add further algorithms for surface generation. For now you can control iso-factor, falloff, falloff types, radius, colors, filtering options and so on. Further more the iso field can be blurred to get smoother results. As said above, performance extremely depends on these parameters...

[ardworx]

could it deal with lets say 200k particles something like that here for example:



pwrapper crashed on this one sadly.. tested it on a q9300 with 8gb ram.
greetz,
ardworx

[owei]

@ardworx
...well, it can deal even with millions of particles. It´s all a question of ram... ;)