Introducing ... The ICE blog

[kim aldis]

http://www.kim-aldis.co.uk/drupal-6.1/taxonomy/term/26

First entry, crawling particles over a surface, a mod of a crowd tutorial wot I did a while back. More to come as it comes but I’m hoping to add to this fairly frequently.

Comments, thoughts, challenges all welcome.

[liltbrockie]

Great Kim!

[PaulF]

That was excellent Kim!

I have a challenge for you:

Re-create the "Tornado ripping through a barn" shot which the mighty Pete Draper did with particle flow. There's a picture of it on his website:

http://www.xenomorphic.co.uk/

There's also a video of it in his gallery.

Cheers.

[Ohmanoggin]

I have no doubt that having Kim in the ICE mix, will make for some incredible stuff.
I can't wait to see what else you come up with.

Ohmanoggin

[kim aldis]

I have a challenge for you:

Re-create the "Tornado ripping through a barn" shot which the mighty Pete Draper did with particle flow.

I won't build entire shots like that, it's too time consuming and I think you'll find a lot of post goes in to help a shot like that and I'll bet more than one particle method but if you can give me some idea of what in particular you're interested in in that shot I'll push it onto my stack.

[liltbrockie]

How about simulating a revolving mass of particles ( the tornado) moving towards the barn mesh object and automating it such that when a particle from the tornado his the mesh object.. the mesh object fragments apart and gets slightly absorbed by the forces that are controlling the tornado ! :-D Go!

[oz42]

Great work Kim.

I'm glad to hear this sort of thing is easy in ICE, I must admit I've been very impressed with every ICE video I've seen so far.

Although I must say that the video looks a little creepy - it's like the start of a horror spoof 'attack of the mutant boxes'!

[EricTRocks]

Hey Kim,

You're super generous as usual, doing an ICE demo for us. Thanks for that and great work.

Challenge: I was chatting with Brad the other day and asked him if it would be possible to do self collision detection / deformation. Such to help with say, a character poking at his own face, as he pokes it with his finger, it pushes inward. What do you think?

Later,
Eric T.

[kim aldis]

a character poking at his own face, as he pokes it with his finger, it pushes inward

Would Thiago step up to the podium please?

[EricTRocks]

Please tell me he already did this! :D

Eric T.

[thiago]

Hey Kim,

You're super generous as usual, doing an ICE demo for us. Thanks for that and great work.

Challenge: I was chatting with Brad the other day and asked him if it would be possible to do self collision detection / deformation. Such to help with say, a character poking at his own face, as he pokes it with his finger, it pushes inward. What do you think?

Later,
Eric T.

that's was already done :)
http://www.xsi-brasil.com/XSI_7/mesh_on_mesh_deform/mesh_on_mesh.html
to make this a self detection would not be hard..

And what about deform a mesh with particles?
http://www.xsi-brasil.com/XSI_7/deform_by_particle/deform_by_particle.html

heh

[EricTRocks]

I've seen the demo for deforming meshes by other meshes. Didn't know how hard it would be to do it to it's own geo though. But I'll take your word for it that it can be done.

Thanks! :)

Eric T.

[thiago]

It wouldn't be useful to just make the entire mesh self collide, it need to be localized some how. Using weight maps is probably the best way to select what's interacting.

I'm sure it can be done, even if you couldn't do in the same mesh you can have proxy objects that match certain shapes where the collision object is.
On that Pixar paper about this technique in Ratatouille, they described the use of collision shapes that the animator could place and make the interaction happen on a specific area.

[EricTRocks]

Yeah I have talked to a few friends about that and that's really awesome. Sort of sculpting poses and face shapes on the fly. Localizing it to the face or to a certain body part on a per shot basis would probably be the method I would suspect. Or even if the animator was given access to paint it where they needed it. All of what you say makes sense especially the proxy objects. I'm seeing more and more 'layered' rigs these days.

Thanks Thiago, sorry to semi-hijack the thread Kim.

Carry on,
Eric T.

[thiago]

BTW awesome blog Kim!
I noticed you had it online right before you do the first post :)

Keep it up :)

[T.I.M.]

Hey KIM, nice blog!

One thing that I really wanna see from ICE is fracturing an object and turning the fragments to RBD as Thinking Particles does! http://www.cebas.com/products/feature.php?UD=10-7888-33-788&PID=15&FID=633 I hope this could be done. I know ICE can't create geometry for now , but should be a way.From my understanding ICE particles could be turned to RBD .For example, after you have a fractured object, to instance all the fragments to particles emited from the center of each chunk. Also, can RBD recognize the shape of the particle instance and collide correctly? I want to see real shattering of object, not the fake one that we saw. I am sure you can do it! :yes:

[kim aldis]

He did. : http://www.xsi-brasil.com/XSI_7/deform_by_particle/deform_by_particle.html

[T.I.M.]

He did. : http://www.xsi-brasil.com/XSI_7/deform_by_particle/deform_by_particle.html



This is cool but aren't the boxes one of the presets for viewport representation of the particles........? This is not enough! :)

Edit: here it is more examples of what i meen:
http://www.cebasusa.com/m_o_v_e_e/RifTPSigg/RifTPSigg.html

[EricTRocks]

You can set custom particle shapes / objects within ICE. Whether it is a box, a torus, a character, whatever. You can also have it randomly pick an object from a group as well. It's very powerful. Last night's demo in NYC was awesome. Mark showed a lot of good stuff and how flexible this work flow is going to be. Again, I'll emphasize, ICE = FLEXIBLE!

Cheers,
Eric T.

[csaez]

Nice blog Kim!