ICE (Interactive Creative Environments) is a new module that XSI has added to it’s library of tricks. If you’ve ever used Hypershade, or XSI’s RenderTree you get a picture of what ICE looks like. Originally named MoonDust, this tool lets you do to geometry, that usually sits in the modifier stack. But geometry is just the tip of the iceberg. It can do all of the stuff described above, but to any thing that exists inside of XSI. All nodes can be effected by this tool. In some cases, I believe AI has been created using ICE. It really becomes a real-time do whatever to anything morpher/generator/renderer/etc. I can’t effectively describe what ICE does but there are some very cool demo’s that can show it.
http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=926#post926 , yeah I posted over on this thread the link to them demoing ik, custom constraints and the pathfinding examples. My fav. is the weight map blending of skinning with dual quat skinning for the shoulders.
Oh man I totally agree Brad, that video was just downright awesome. I tried to get my hands on the trial of this sucker but after I check my emailed link it’s the exact same form for some reason (instead of the expanded one it’s supposed to be):tear:.
I suppose the key question is how do you get that info out and into a game? If you rig using ICE, then the scene seems to contain less nodes as a lot of the calculations go through the ICE graph. Would you query the ICE graph to work out how things move? And where do the keyframes live?
Our current exporter (for Max) wouldn’t export anything except for the mesh as it would be looking for bones and their transformations. Or is all this stuff trivial and it’s just the way you work in XSI anyway?
The output of the graph still endup living on joints in the file… rigging and the final output of the rig for export to read is two diffrent things… just so nice that they have all that power exposed and multi threaded and its not easy to break if you delete a node or want to reuse it…
The output of the graph still endup living on joints in the file… rigging and the final output of the rig for export to read is two diffrent things… just so nice that they have all that power exposed and multi threaded and its not easy to break if you delete a node or want to reuse it…:nod:
hi,
Oh man I totally agree Brad, that video was just downright awesome. I tried to get my hands on the trial of this sucker but after I check my emailed link it’s the exact same form for some reason (instead of the expanded one it’s supposed to be)
