Ice geometry output options for xsi 7 ?

[Manticor]

hi guys .As some of you may have noticed , our studio are still on XSI 7.01 .Im really getting into ice recently and as I work in games Im interested in creating geometry with ice . What addons were /are available that output meshes for v7 .
I know about andy nicholas' ouput render mesh , I vaguely remember guilleme laforge doing some experimental topo stuff before ice topo came out (which sadly are no longer available) .
Can anyone suggest any other stuff ?

thanks

[Tekano]

Hello, am guessing its Matt right? am not quite sure I understand - its all a bit hazy memory for back then was there ICE topo in v7? and if there was and you have the geometry built in XSI then its already available to export like any other geometry.

if you mean the Mr. Laforge ICE modelling stuff which was as far as I remember turning instances on particles into geometry and some UV stuff its still available, thanks to Rray here http://rray.de/xsi/ just search topo and use the local backup

thanks again to rray! I imagine that anything left that is still available for xsi v7 is to be found there

[Mathaeus]

mt_strandNodes addon, same thing as I recently posted here, can create mesh extrusions along ICE strands. It's standard SI operator, but it works on ICE strands. By the way it seems to be fairly easier to use, probably even faster than completely ICE solution, added few years later. There are some compounds, included in Kristinka Hair, that allows adding the taper or non uniform scaled cross section, sticking the extrusions back to strands, workarounds for applying UV as well. Generally I made them for creating polygon hair, maybe in games too - but, personally, don't know if anyone tried to do that. Mainly they were used for simulating with Syflex.
Latest "knit strands" compounds have built in attributes for getting mentioned extrusion from ICE strands. Now I'd again post a link to this same pic (pic is somehow intentional demonstration of ICE tools, so no need to comment the artistic part ) - chairs and similar things are *partially* procedural ICE thing. Knit strands compounds were used by community, to some extent, afaik. But, don't believe, these hundreds of thousands vertices will fit into any game, even today.

[Manticor]

Hello, am guessing its Matt right?

No not Matt .Not sure who matt is
Thanks for the heads up tekano.

[Manticor]

Thanks again mattheus .The strandnodes and your kristinka pack for hair are a BIG bonus for me.
I think I can do a lot of topo stuff with this , the particle instancer is incredibly useful.
Unfortunately I cant seem to be able to get the strand extrusions working.Tried all kinds of things but its complaining about strandScale and strandRotations being missing. I added some set datas with rotation and 3d vector values set with these names but still not working.

I checked helge's example scenes from his ice tutorials pack but couldn't find anything for strandextrusion.Also had a quick look at Kristinka using emit quads from strands but I couldn't get that to work either.

Would it be possible for you to provide me a basic setup .emdl that demonstrates how to properly use createstrandextrusion please.
Im wanting to create a basic roads generator ,so if this strandextrusion takes in a cross section to generate the roads then Im gonna be very happy.

Many thanks for your help Mattheus

[Manticor]

Sorry ... I figured it out using your KH2 Prepare for MT extrusion.

Just need to figure out how to change the profile shape.

if that is at all possible....

[Mathaeus]

Just need to figure out how to change the profile shape.

if that is at all possible....

If you mean using a curve for arbitrary profile shape - directly it is not possible. But, it is possible to do it later, using ICE tree on mesh extrusion. Helge's addon produces a nicely ordered mesh ( ordered - indices are uniformly distributed along cross sections and length of tube), so no big deal to identify the cross sections and replace it. With some limitations too, extruded mesh has to be frozen, without any changes in topology.
Would be nice to know what you want to do exactly, somehow it's not easy to create an universal compound for such purpose. For Kristinka Hair, I already have a few small tools in my bag. For else, I'd really need to know more, about the specific case. I suppose the standard SI extrude along curve operator isn't enough?

[Manticor]

Sorry for the late reply.

Im actually wanting to create a procedural road maker that conforms to an underlying ground .That creates a mapped road and kerb from guide curves .Also adding instanced street furniture( which I have already solved ...kind of) .I think maybe I should add python into the mix to solve some of the tasks that I cant solve with v7 ... such as creating the junctions where the roads meet.Its really to save a myself and others in the teams time from blocking out road networks as uv mapping them is a very tedious chore.
So I think I may well create the roads through script using the standard approach and instance the lamposts etc through Ice .And maybe I could generate a polygon description array in ice for the junctions and send that over to python for meshing.

Im currently stuck with something at the moment.... how do I access the point positions of a member of a group ?

Thanks for your help Mattheus