Monthly Archives: February 2012

Aligning particles and making instances look at something

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Dealing with particle orientation and rotation can be frustrating, especially when you’re first learning.

Here, I’ve got a bunch of faces instanced onto a disc, and I want all of them to to look the closest point on the grid that’s in the center of the disc. Because the initial local Z axis of some particles faces “away” from the grid, you get can some weird popping and flipping. Here’s an illustration of the problem from an earlier test, when I was aligning the faces to look at a specific point. Notice how only the instances on one side of the null have problems.

So, I use the dot product to determine whether the local Z axis faces “away” from the target grid, and if so, I make an adjustment of 180 degrees, and then the faces align nicely.

A negative dot product tells me that the angle between the local Z axis and the vector to the closest point on the grid is more than 90 and less than 270.

Making a Null follow a particle

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Given a particle emission, how do you make a null (or some other 3d object, for that matter) follow a specific particle?

  1. Select the null.
  2. In the ICE toolbar, click Kinematics > Effects > Transform Objects by Particles.
  3. Pick the point cloud.

The null is now constrained to particle 0. There’s an ICETree on the null where you can change the particle index, to constrain the null to a particle with a different ID.

For a more detailed, low-level look into this, see the video ICE Kine – Drive from particles by Eric T.

Overriding SPDL defaults

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In the old days, if you didn’t like some default shader parameter setting, you had to edit a SPDL file and generate a new preset. As of 2011, you can use the ObjectModel (OM) to dynamically update the shader definition.

For example, if you run this Python snippet in the script editor, then the next time you create an Environment shader, it will have some different defaults:

  • Environment Mode will default to Cylinder
  • Transformation will have a connection icon
  • Background Intensity will default to 0.5
from siutils import si		# Application
from siutils import log		# LogMessage
from siutils import disp	# win32com.client.Dispatch
from siutils import C		# win32com.client.constants

# Get ShaderDef for the Environment shader
sProgID = "Softimage.sib_environment.1.0"
oDef = si.GetShaderDef( "Softimage.sib_environment.1.0" )

# Get ShaderParamDef for the Tranformation parameter
oTransform = oDef.InputParamDefs.GetParamDefByName( "transform" )

# Make it texturable so it has a connection icon
oTransform.Texturable = True


# Make Cylinder the default Environment mode
oParam = oDef.InputParamDefs.GetParamDefByName( "mode" )
oParam.DefaultValue = 1

# Change the default background intensity to 0.5
oParam = oDef.InputParamDefs.GetParamDefByName( "background_intensity" )
oParam.DefaultValue = 0.5

So, that’s how you update a shader definition. Now, all you have to do is stick that code into a siOnCreateShaderDef event plugin, and every time you create an Environment shader, it will have the defaults you want

import win32com.client
from win32com.client import constants

null = None
false = 0
true = 1

def XSILoadPlugin( in_reg ):
	in_reg.Author = "blairs"
	in_reg.Name = "ShaderDef Plug-in"
	in_reg.Major = 1
	in_reg.Minor = 0

	in_reg.RegisterEvent("CreateShaderDef",constants.siOnCreateShaderDef)

	return true

def XSIUnloadPlugin( in_reg ):
	strPluginName = in_reg.Name
	return true

# Callback for the CreateShaderDef event.
def CreateShaderDef_OnEvent( in_ctxt ):
	oDef = in_ctxt.GetAttribute("ShaderDef")
	sProgID = str(in_ctxt.GetAttribute("ProgID"))
	if "Softimage.sib_environment.1.0" in sProgID:
		oDef.InputParamDefs.GetParamDefByName( "transform" ).Texturable = True

# 	Return value is ignored as this event can not be aborted.
	return true

Tip: Use the SDK Explorer (CTRL+SHIFT+4) to get the ProgID of a shader.

Screenshots of the week

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Custom rigging tools – Making of IGA – Odeur de Pain
by SHED Mtl

Shape blending with ICE using image sequences
by Ola Madsen

Raycast to weightmap
by EricTRocks

Simple electrical arcs
by Matic (follow link for downloads)

Instantiating a torus on every face of a dodecahedron
by piotrekm

Implicit cosine cloud
by Daniel Brassard

http://pic.twitter.com/LWbJtYvx

Logo motion
by twinsnakes007

Evenly distributing points on a sphere with the golden section spiral

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This post is based on the recent xsibase thread Golden Section Spiral in ICE, which in turn is based on Patrick Boucher’s 2006 article Points on a sphere.

So…here’s an ICE version of the Golden section spiral algorithm for evenly distributing points on a sphere. It’s a typical example of basic “thinking in ICE”: when you see a for loop in the alogrithm/pseudocode, you should see “in ICE” an array (or data set) flowing through a graph.

Here’s my GoldenSectionSpiral compound (although if you’ve never converted a scripted alogithm to ICE, you should do it yourself just for the exercise 😉 I thought the spiral effect was interesting, so I put in an option to not convert radians to degrees (which is necessary to get the real evenly distributed points).

Animating the Environment shader Transformation parameter

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We’ve had a couple of questions about this recently, so here goes…

In the 2011 release, parameters like the Environment shader’s Transformation parameter were changed to expose the raw transformation matrix instead of StaticKineState. This allows ICE attributes to plug directly in the shader input matrix ports and have texturable matrix ports.

A transformation matrix is a combination of the scaling, rotation, and translation, and when you start animating those values, you’re going to see some “weird” numbers 😉 For example, if I animate the Z rotation from 0 to 45 degrees, I’ll see this in the Animation Editor. Note that in the viewport I’m using ICE to show the transformation matrix for a cone that has the same Z rotation from 0 to 45 degrees: see how it matches up with the fcurves for the Environment transformation.

To make things more artist-friendly, you have to make the Transformation parameter texturable so you can plug in a Create_Transform node in the render tree.

To make the Transformation parameter texturable, install this addon.

Simple example of a parametric point cloud

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Here’s a simple parametric point cloud that shows the two techniques for using arrays instead of Repeats that I blogged about earlier:

Using arrays to avoid Repeat part I
Using arrays to avoid Repeat part II

I used this set of parametric equations to get a cylinder point cloud:

x = sin(u)
y = cos(u)
z = v

where

0 <= u <= 2*PI
-2 <= v <= 2

For this exercise, I simply used Build Interpolated Array to build arrays of U and V values, but I probably should use something like the XYZ_Grid_Generator technique described by Daniel Brassard on si-community.

Here’s a version of the ICE tree with some Show Values.

I use the Modulo technique to build an array of the XY values for all points in the cloud.

Then I use the Divide by Scalar technique (the integer result is truncated) to build an array of the Z values.

Finally, I add XY vectors to the Z vectors to get the final point positions.

Scripting the output file format for viewport captures

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Here’s how to set the default value for the FormatType list in the Capture Viewport dialog box.

from siutils import si		# Application
from siutils import log		# LogMessage
from siutils import disp	# win32com.client.Dispatch
from siutils import C		# win32com.client.constants

# Set the capture options
oViewportCapture = si.Dictionary.GetObject("ViewportCapture")
paramFormatType = si.Dictionary.GetObject( "ViewportCapture.FormatType" )

# Set default to JPEG
paramFormatType.Value = 5

# Display Viewport Capture dialog
si.CaptureViewport( 2, True )


# FormatType values
# -----------------
# 0 Alias
# 1 AVI
# 2 BMP
# 3 Cineon (DPX)
# 4 Cineon (FIDO)
# 5 JPEG
# 6 Memory mapped
# 7 mental ray color
# 8 OpenEXR
# 9 PGM
# 10 Photoshop PSD
# 11 Pict
# 12 PNG
# 13 PPM
# 14 Quicktime
# 15 SGI
# 16 Softimage .pic
# 17 Son Playstation2 TIM2/CLUT2
# 18 Targa
# 19 Tiff
# 20 Valve
# 21 Wavefront
# 22 YUV

If you are scripting a non-interactive viewport capture, you don’t use FormatType. Instead, the output file format is determined by the file extension of the output file name.
Here’s a Python version of the example on the CaptureViewport reference page.

from siutils import si		# Application
from siutils import log		# LogMessage
from siutils import disp	# win32com.client.Dispatch
from siutils import C		# win32com.client.constants
import win32com.client.dynamic

# Get the current frame
fc = si.ActiveProject.Properties("Play Control").Parameters("Current").Value

# Set the capture options
oViewportCapture = si.Dictionary.GetObject("ViewportCapture")

# Capture a 1-frame sequence 
start = oViewportCapture.NestedObjects("Start Frame")
win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch(start).Value = fc

end = oViewportCapture.NestedObjects("End Frame")       
win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch(end).Value = fc

# Specify the output file name
# For scripted captures, the output file format is determined by the extension
name = oViewportCapture.NestedObjects("File Name")
win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch(name).Value = "C:\\test.jpg"

# No dialog
si.CaptureViewport( 2, False );