Possible developing an Ecosystem ICE ?

[ewok]

Dear Softimage-Team,

i got a got question for your developers,
is it possible to build an ecosystem like this (http://www.highend3d.com/articles/references/28-2.html) with the current standard ice nodes ?
i got several ideas in setting up their position and their height.

as i read one thread before, procedural modelling, like l-system is not implemented yet,
it would be great to get those features in ice, as nodes.

if no l-system is integrated yet,
it should be possible to get several different versions of plants,
if it is possible to acces the modelling history in ice !(?!) (and to do a nice coherent modelling of course...)

is that imaginable / realizable in ice ?

so far, keep your great work up,
best regards,
ewok.

[CiaranM]

I'm no beta tester, so everything I say is speculative.
But, from the demo's I've seen I don't see why you couldn't do something along these lines using instanced geometry. At least in terms of generating the plant procedurally. I've procedurally generated and animated plant forms using the comparatively crude (compared to ICE) Maya particle instances and expressions, so I don't imagine ICE would have too much of a problem.
If you look at the nodes present in ICE here (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=59&t=650549&page=7&pp=15), it looks like there could be enough tools built-in to construct an l-system or other rule based method to control the placement of particles and thus instanced geometry.
If you were at the NYC launch event, you would have seen Andreas Gebhardt's very cool ecosystem simulations.....
As you might guess this is an area that also interests me,so I can't wait to have a play with ICE!
Instances are not as elegant as the Houdini approach, but perhaps that will come in time?

[Hirazi Blue]

An old implementation of L-systems in XSI was done by Helge Mathee and can be found at www.mindthink.de (http://www.mindthink.de), under "codeteam" and after registration, as "lsysxsi.zip". I am not sure if it still works with current versions of XSI, although I would imagine mindthink taking it down, if it obviously didn't anymore...

[EricTRocks]

Yes it can. A gentleman from Psyop demoed his tree growing ICE system that made trees grow in random spots, then they "dropped seeds" around them thus causing more growth. He went further with it and show that once the forest got built up enough, loggers would then come in and setup camp, chop down trees then move on from there.

Now this was all done with a 2d setup on a top down basis, HOWEVER from what I've read on the beta list and seen in the vids it is looking like it is possible to setup a plant's growth (extrusion, shape anim, etc) to change according to what is around that particular particle. NOTE that we are talking about instanced geometry on particles.

I do hope that Softimage posts those vids they showed at the NYC launch event.

Hope that helps a bit,
Eric T.

PS - They also said in NYC that many schools were approaching them about using ICE for mathmatical modeling and simulations such as this one.

[ewok]

wow, informative replys indeed,
thank you very much !

what can i say anymore,
as anyone here, i like to work with ice
and get new visual stuff build, to get even more creative.

ps. i studied in Germany near Berlin, at The German Filmschool,
and first we got to know about maya, second was xsi, max and lightwave,
and every student was free to decide on his own, whats favorite tool he would choose.
As one of the few, i decided for xsi, with a good feeling in future that we already
got very cool features in this package yet. I like to work with xsi for years now
and am very happy for gettin' even better tools at my fingertips.

so keep it up,
you got my full support.

greets, ewok. :)