Slice to Pieces

[iamVFX]

I'm trying to work with K.I.S.S. principle keeping in head now. This compound is a result of 2 hour full of fun work. Extremely simple and fast.

So what it does it slice geometry with capping in a super fast way because of merge topo array technique. You can dive into the compound and see how it works, there's not so many nodes actually.

Accepts arrays on input. It means that we can create a procedural exploding pizza boxes simulator with use of momentum in four steps!

1) Create a box



2) Apply Slice to Pieces compound

3) Build Linear Interpolated Array and set values from (0, -3,2, 0) to (0, 3,2, 0) as the origin and normal planes, set size to 10

[rimg=500]http://xsisupport.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/agneov.png[/rimg]

4) Apply momentum deform bodies with ground and have fun playing with it!

[Chris_TC]

Looks very handy, thank you!

[iamVFX]

You're welcome, Chris!

[guillaume]

Nice KISS compound indeed.

For the little story, I added the "Slice, Delete and Collapse Vertices" option in the Slice Polygon node at the last minute ;). Good to see that it is smartly used.

[bottleofram]

Simple but interesting.

How about adding an inset in between the slices?

If that doesn't go too much against the KISS idea, of course... ;)

[iamVFX]

Nice KISS compound indeed.

For the little story, I added the "Slice, Delete and Collapse Vertices" option in the Slice Polygon node at the last minute ;). Good to see that it is smartly used.

Guil, your impact to softimage was great, ICE modeling is super cool feature and we all thank you and other developers who implement that! Good luck with new fun projects!

Simple but interesting.

How about adding an inset in between the slices?

If that doesn't go too much against the KISS idea, of course... ;)

Great idea, bottleofram, as always! (would be nice if I'll know your real name, by the way ;) ) Here the inset, this is 1.1 version and I will not delete the previous one so that everyone had an idea what's happened to compound from version to version.

[bottleofram]

Haha, and you are as quick as always!

As a sidenote, i'm amazed by people who manage to keep it simple. Paid the price of failure far too many times for not keeping that principle in mind!


Its Alex, btw. Nice to meet 'ya.

[bottleofram]

[iamVFX]

Interesting idea, Alex. It's reminds me some of the architectural shapes for some reason, especially with triangle example

Here is the new quick lazy 1.2 update! I found interesting idea in Paul's tutorial about creating a thickness map. So I use raycast node for finding outside polygons, it works stable in all cases because capped polygons of sliced mesh will always be looking at each other since mesh is sliced by a flat planes. Here is some other usage of the compound:

[iamVFX]

Actually, no, I have to delete it since some of the polygons of the mesh can be faced to each other aside from the sliced ones

Coming up next: 1.3 fix...

[iamVFX]

1.3 is here.

[rimg=600]http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/5526/59348265.png[/rimg]

1) It was obvious that if the polygon does not lie on the slice plane it's just not sliced. I use dot product instead of raycast now, so you get proper MaterialID indices.
2) Inset accepts array of values only. If you want to have one value for all slices use Build Array from Constant node (see Example 1).
3) Special blocker was added for the performance stability of the package - if origin and normal plane arrays are not the same size it will be not executed at all.

Although the compound is much more complex now, the speed is actually the same since I doesn't do anything complicated.


P.S. I found a simpler and faster way to delete geometry, by the way!

[rimg=500]http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/3783/39845193.png[/rimg]

It's slow process if you use delete polygon or vertex nodes since topology can be really heavy, especially dealing with repeat node, so... Don't delete it! Replace topo with one triangle and delete that poly instead. Done! lol

[rimg=500]http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/756/26117884.png[/rimg]


Example model with cubes from post above is included in archive file

[scaron]

hey constantine

thanks for the continued updates.the 'fast delete' you mention, is this just a general observation or is it relevant to your slice compound? in other words when would you want to just delete all polygons?

[iamVFX]

hey constantine

thanks for the continued updates.the 'fast delete' you mention, is this just a general observation or is it relevant to your slice compound? in other words when would you want to just delete all polygons?

Yes, it's relevant to this compound

So basically I delete current topo to store new sliced piece with other one by the end of the 2-step loop, since factory Slice Polygon node give only one piece at time. Then for the next slice plane I repeat the process with the new sliced mesh that was stored.

Since I can't store only some parts of the topology type data it should be deleted to ensure that it's not placed in the array again

And it's crazy, only imagine it, I delete all the polygons of the mesh and then create them again in the repeat loop several times! It's dumb, it's lazy and sounds like it should work super slow. But in reality it's not. And this is so cool for me, and I don't know why only for me, lol

The inspiration for doing this was given by a lecture of Jonathan Blow, part when he tells about DooM source code and its "unoptimized" assets search, be sure to check this out: http://www.myplick.com/view/7CRyJCWLM71/CSUA-talk

[scaron]

The inspiration for doing this was given by a lecture of Jonathan Blow, part when he tells about DooM source code and its "unoptimized" assets search, be sure to check this out: http://www.myplick.com/view/7CRyJCWLM71/CSUA-talk

awesome, thanks!

[sekow]

spend the weekend to get to the same point, and now i stumble upon this..
i should check the forums more often. great work constantine !

[iamVFX]

I redesigned the capping of the standard Slice Polygon node. Also it's much faster now.

[rimg=400]http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/695/screenshot1zb.png[/rimg][rimg=400]http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/8264/screenshot2ug.png[/rimg]

I will upload it soon with the updated Procedural Topo Pack, stay tuned.