At emit, the particles are colored based on the noicon texture map.
When the particles collide with grid1, they pick up the color of the XSI logo texture map.
Using texture maps
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Monthly Archives: April 2011
Tips for searching the new online help
Wildcards
You can use the wildcards * and ?.
* matches one or more characters, and ? matches a single character.
Special Characters Ignored
The following special characters are ignored and treated as white-space:
[ ] ^ $ . | + ( ) ` ~ ! # % & – = { } ; ‘” ,
Stop words
Common words like “a”, “an”, “the”, and “get” and “set” are filtered out of searches, even if you do a phrase search.
Note that searches like “g?t s?t sum” won’t find the ICE node “Get Set Sum”.
Friday Flashback #16
Thanks to Octavian from the XSI mailing list, here’s a reel from an old XSI CD he had.
Not sure if it is from XSI 1.5 or XSI 2.0.
Here’s a collage of frames from the reel:
Softimage 2012 ICE tree for the Artist Guide #2 tutorial
I went through the first 10min or so of Bradley Gabe’s excellent An Artist Tour #2 and built the corresponding ICE tree in 2012 with the Simulation Root node.
Making particles spiral upwards
As a learning exercise, after watching Chris Marshall’s corkscrew tutorial, I did a variation based on the unit circle.
Running Softimage on other distros like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pardus, and Gentoo
Here’s a workaround for running Softimage on other distros like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pardus, and Gentoo.
On these distros, some users have noticed problems with images (cannot browse for images, or even create noicon clips). Or Softimage can create and even save scenes, but crashes when you open a scene.
One of the Softimage developers believes he may have tracked down the source of this problem. The Softimage library libdsprsr.so has a dependency on libtiff and libjpeg. If either of these is missing, then the Softimage library fails to register correctly (during the install), but unfortunately no error is reported.
As a workaround you can try the following steps:
- Open your Softimage shell and source the .xsi file
- cd to the “Application\bin” folder
- Run cmdreg libdsprsr.so
- If you get an error, then you have this problem, so we can try to fix it. Now run ldd libdsprsr.so
- You should see that 1 (or more) libraries are missing – most likely libtiff and/or libjpeg.
- Install the required package(s) to get the missing libraries and then run the cmdreg again: cmdreg libdsprsr.so
- It should register now and all the problems with image nodes will be gone.
- If you have other strange problem you can ensure that all the Softimage libraries are registered correctly, by re-registering them all by running cmdreg -f XSICOMDLLs.lst
- If you have any errors, run the steps above checking the failing library with ldd to see which libraries are missing.
Hat tip: Sean Donnelly
Emitting particles from polygon clusters
Here’s an ICE tree that emits a particle from each polygon in a cluster.
In Emit from Position, I’ve set the Rate Type to Total Number of Particles, and the Rate to 1, so I get a single particle per polygon.
I exploded the Align to Emit Location compound and modified it to use the PolygonNormal to align the particles (which I’ve set to “cones”).
Hat tip: Sebastian Kowalski on the XSI mailing list
Softimage compounds, plugins, and scripts from the AREA
I put together a page that lists all the Softimage compounds, plugins, and scripts available in the download section of the AREA.
I find the AREA downloads a bit difficult to browse and search, so I thought a single page that lists everything would be useful.
Building a Corkscrew Effect in ICE
Breakup an object by polygon
Here’s one way to take a mesh and turn every polygon into a separate object.
First, download and install the JP_Separate plugin (requires an AREA logon). See below the fold for install instructions.
Then, do this:
- Select all polygons.
- Click Modify > Poly Mesh > Disconnect Components, and select the Explode check box.
- Select the sphere.
- Click Modify > Poly Mesh > JP_Separate to make each polygon a separate object.
Hat Tip: Grahame Fuller on the mailing list.
Here’s an example. After breaking up a default sphere into 64 new objects (one per polygon), I used “Transform Objects by Particles” to create this simple effect:
eX-SI 