Screenshots of the week

Posted on December 23, 2013 by xsisupport

shallow water simulation coupled with lagoa multiphysics
http://vimeo.com/82292791

Fabric Engine for plugin developers (Eric Mootz first look)
http://vimeo.com/82296039

Depth map visualisation
by P Dairy via si-community
Not new, but re-posted this week.

Friday Flashback #151

Posted on December 20, 2013 by xsisupport

Xmas-style XSI logo from 2004

Fixing DLL problems

Posted on December 19, 2013 by xsisupport

If you ask me, these are all bad ideas:

Downloading missing DLLs from some DLL download site you found via a web search
Copying DLLs to your system32 folder
Copying DLLs from one version of Softimage to another

Fixing DLL problems involves doing some troubleshooting to figure out the root cause of the problem. Often, an error message about a DLL is just a symptom.

For missing DLLs, don’t download the DLL from some dll-download site. Usually a re-install of your software package, or an install of the appropriate redistributable package, will fix the problem.

Copying a DLL from one version of an application to another is a little crazy. You’re just asking for trouble 😉

ICE: Deleting Polygons

Posted on December 18, 2013 by xsisupport

There’s several ways you might put together an ICE tree to delete the polygons inside a null.

Scripting FBX export and import

Posted on December 17, 2013 by xsisupport

You can use the FBXExport command to create the ExportFBXOptions property, and then use either the OM or SetValue to set the FBX options. For example, this Python snippet creates the FBX property by calling FBXExport( “option” ), and then sets the FBX SDK version (for which there is no separate FBXSetExport command).

si = Application
si.FBXExport( "option" )
o = si.Dictionary.GetObject( "ExportFBXOptions" )
o.Parameters( "FBXSDKVersion" ).Value = "FBX201300"

You can do the same thing for FBXImport with FBXImport( “option” ), but I always got an error, even if the property was created.

si = Application

try:
	si.FBXImport( "option" )
except:
	o = si.Dictionary.GetObject( "ImportFBXOptions" )
	
si.LogMessage( o )

Screenshots of the week

Posted on December 16, 2013 by xsisupport

Softimage toolbar
http://vimeo.com/81906535

Softimage ICE – Tutorial – Bend strands; unsimulated gravity

Softimage, OpenVDB and Arnold in cloud modeling test
http://vimeo.com/81459393

VDB WIP
by Mr.Core

Four-point corner pin
by caledonian_tartan

ICE Garden: Bloody Flow

Eric Mootz aka MOOTZOID interview on the AREA

Friday Flashback #150

Posted on December 13, 2013 by xsisupport

XSI v2.0 Special Competitive Trade in Program, valid till 31-December 2001

I wonder where they got the XSI Chinese Manual?

Emitting strands from a polygon cluster

Posted on December 12, 2013 by xsisupport

Here’s a simple ICE tree that emits strands from a polygon cluster.

A general technique for these kinds of filtered emissions is to delete the points you don’t want. In this case, we check Cluster.IsElement. The tricky part is that Cluster.IsElement is a bool-per-polygon attribute, so we need to get into a per-point context. To do that, we get the emit location, which is per-point, and then at that location, the value of Cluster.IsElement. Now we’re in a per-point context, and we can use those per-point boolean values to delete points.

Note the use of Not instead of an If. We know IsElement is False for points that were not emitted from the polygon cluster, so we can logically negate it with Not to get True and feed that into Delete Point.

In pseudocode, we do this:

if not( IsElement ) delete point

instead of

if (IsElement == False) then delete point

Of course, for filtering we could just drill down into Emit Strands and set the filter on the Generate Sample Set nodes.

Adding ReferenceWidgets to PPGs?

Posted on December 10, 2013 by xsisupport

It used to be possible to add a ReferenceWidget by calling oLayout.AddItem( “Param”, “ref”, “ReferenceWidget” ) in your DefineLayout. But that was four or five years ago, and it no longer works.

def MyProperty3333_DefineLayout( in_ctxt ):
	oLayout = in_ctxt.Source
	oLayout.Clear()

	# Test some other control types
	oLayout.AddItem( "Param", "txt", "Texture Space" )
	oLayout.AddItem( "Param", "scnref", "SceneReferenceWidget" )

	# Doesn't work
	oLayout.AddItem( "Param", "ref", "ReferenceWidget" )

	# Doesn't work
	oPPGItem = oLayout.AddItem( "Param", "", "dscontrol" ) ;
	oPPGItem.SetAttribute( "UIType", "ReferenceWidget" );

For reference 😉 this is a ReferenceWidget:

And this is how a ReferenceWidget is added in SPDL:

	Parameter "inst_source" input
	{
		title = "Instance source";
		guid = "{5620730D-AEFC-4C4A-B1DF-9377E808E27B}";
		type = reference;
	}
...
	inst_source
	{
		Name = "Source Object";
		UIType = "ReferenceWidget.ReferenceWidget.1"
		{
			filter = "{6B579D20-3DC5-11D0-9449-00AA006D3165}";
			mode = "single";
		}
	}