A bullet shattering glass effect got a very characteristic pattern (and very different from the well known voronoi one).
As in Softimage 2012 we can build some polygon meshes using ICE, it was a good exercise to illustrate the flexibility of this new Softimage weapon 
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My first test was trying to slice an existing mesh using a radial design. It was not so bad but rather complex. I needed something more simple. We’ve got sphere or torus primitives, and I wanted a shattered glass primitive, nothing more.
Looking at the some pictures and videos of glass shattering I noticed that the radial cracks and rings starting at the center of the impact could be simplified to an “un-wrapped cylindrical extrusion”. As I’ve got already an ICE compound to build such extrusion (and as I am lazy), I choosed this solution.
Re-factoring this compound, it was easy to generate the good polygonal description (the array describing the vertices of each polygons). Then the job was to set the position of this extrusion in a radial pattern with some randomness scaled by the distance from the center. The first tests were not so bad. Here is a little demo :
And here is the ICE compound . To use it, just create an empty polygon mesh, add an ICETree in the modeling region and connect the compound.
At least here is a little rendered animation using Momentum for the simulation (a Softimage open source plugin using the Bullet Physics library) and Arnold for the rendering (using the Softimage to Arnold plugin) :
Thats all for this first public ICE modeling compound ! If I find some time, maybe other ones will follow…
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