Linking an ICE compound to a help page

Posted on November 19, 2013 by xsisupport

The short answer is that you can’t do it, not really. The best you can do is provide a URL in the compound properties

and then right-click the compound and click Open Netview on URL.

For ICE compounds, a CompoundNode property is loaded into the PPG when you inspect the compound.

This CompoundNode is like a proxy container for the actual compound, and it takes care of populating the PPG with the required controls, and finding the right help page. To do that, it just takes the name of the compound and constructs a URL like http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_MyCompound.htm. (Hmm, having just said that, I figure if you had a local version of the help, then you could stick your own help page there, and Softimage would find it.)

For shader compounds it’s a little better, because you can put something like this in your PPG Logic, and it will work.

#ppg logic start
from win32com.client import constants

def OnInit():
    Application.LogMessage( "OnInit" )
    PPG.PPGLayout.SetAttribute( constants.siUIHelpFile, "http://lmgtfy.ca" )
#ppg logic end

hat tip: everybody on this thread

Screenshots of the week

Posted on November 18, 2013 by xsisupport

Arnold shader “OSO” in emTools version 1.910
by Mootzoid

A script that applies fur via ICE. And Compression Matting on the fur

feathers and script improvements

Compression Matting on fur controlled by texture map

UV to position
by Mathaeus

Transform UVs in the render tree
by NNois

Select in Array until Max Sum

Read color information of a texture map
by face

About transformation matrices…

Posted on October 29, 2013 by xsisupport

You don’t necessarily have to understand everything about transformation matrices to use them. Just understand then when you multiply a point by a transformation matrix, you’re applying scaling, rotation, and translation to that point all at once.

If you do want to understand more, you can use ICE to visualize what goes into a transformation matrix:

And you can do some reading 🙂

Simple Introduction to Matrix’s in Softimage
SRT matrix explanation on si-community (from Daniel B.)
SRT Values in Transoformation Matrices (video)
How to Read a 3×3 Matrix
What is Softimage scaling anyway?

Getting ICE attribute values with greater precision

Posted on October 1, 2013 by xsisupport

As you know, in Softimage all scalar (aka floating point) values are displayed with 3 (or sometimes 4) decimal places. For example: 0.333 instead of 0.33333333333…

One way to display the attribute value with greater precision is to use the Log Values node, and multiply the attribute value by some power of 10 (to get more digits). Hat tip to Leonard Koch for that suggestion.

The above Log Values outputs this:

# INFO : 4000 - elt 0: 3333333504.000000

You could also use scripting. But note how I get 0 for the attribute named _tmp, even though it is clearly set to 0.3333333333333 in the ICE graph.

x = si.Selection(0)
y = x.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.ICEAttributes( "tmp" )
if y.IsDefined:
	print "tmp = %.10f" % y.DataArray[0]
	
y = x.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.ICEAttributes( "_tmp" )
if y.IsDefined:
	print "_tmp = %.10f" % y.DataArray[0]

# tmp = 0.3333333433
# _tmp = 0.0000000000

Finally, here’s a quick hack using a proxy parameter and the SDK explorer:

Getting the neighbors of a specific point, part 2

Posted on September 25, 2013 by xsisupport

As I wrote yesterday, there surely was a better way to get the neighbors of a specific point than messing around with a bunch of arrays. Here it is.

Hat tip to Eric Thivierge

Getting the neighbors of a specific point

Posted on September 24, 2013 by xsisupport

There’s surely a better way, but this was a good little exercise in using ICE array nodes.

Context matters: Get Set Size versus Get Array Size

Posted on September 17, 2013 by xsisupport

PointNeighbors is a set of per-point arrays, so when you feed that into Get Array Size, you get a set of per-point integers (the number of neighbors for each point). Get Set Size, in contrast, will give you a per-object integer (the number of per-point arrays in the set).

Generating the Fibonacci series with ICE

Posted on September 12, 2013 by xsisupport

The Fibonacci series is a sequence of numbers starting with 0, 1 and where each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ...

Thanks to Binet’s Fibonacci number formula, I didn’t have to use a Repeat node 😉

Binet_Fibonacci_Number_Formula.xsicompound

More fun with arrays

Posted on September 10, 2013 by xsisupport

Here’s a recent array question from the mailing list: How do you build an array that looks like this?

[0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, ...] ?

I didn’t check the other answers yet, because that would be cheating 😉

When I look at that array, I see a repeating sequence of four integers, so that naturally suggests doing something with the Modulo node.

Using the If node is nice for clarity, but I could simply take the Boolean output of the comparison node.

Set Flags and bitmasks

Posted on September 3, 2013 by xsisupport

Set Flags shows how to store multiple boolean flags in a single integer value. In programming, this is known as a bitmask or as bit flags, and the idea is based on the binary number system where each digit can be only 0 or 1 (on or off, true or false).

For example, in the binary number 1010, you have four bit flags: flags 0 and 3 are false, and flags 1 and 4 are true. The decimal equivalent of 1010 is 10 (2¹ + 2³).

Binary	Decimal	Power of 2
00000001	1	2⁰
00000010	2	2¹
00000100	4	2²
00001000	8	2³
00010000	16	2⁴
00100000	32	2⁵
01000000	64	2⁶
10000000	128	2⁷

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ICE, scripting, and other tech stuff about Softimage aka XSI

Category Archives: ICE