Merging and Rendering Curves Tool

I found some time to update my Render Curves compound. Now, it is a little bit more advanced as it became an Addon with a custom C++ operator, a custom property and the ICE compound.

The custom C++ operator gives you the ability to merge some curves together. In the “merged curve”, there is a custom property to add or remove curves from the MergeCurves operator. There is also a button to create the point cloud with a Render Curves compound in one click.

Here is a demo video.

If you find it useful, I will post an Addon soon. Stay tuned !

An other way to render curves in XSI 7

Looking at Helge Mathee bezier curve ICE tree today, I realised that we can render a curve using a point cloud with only one point.
All the work is done by a strands array. This video show how to build the ICE tree from scratch in 2 minutes.
Ok, I used the “Fill Interpolated Array” compound from Helge to speed up the recording …

I hope it will help ICE beginners to understand strands.

Cheers !

ICE circle and a “Cluster Center” method.

I made a Circle Compound in ICE. I think this is a good exercise to understand ICE principles, so feel free to download and learn the compound and sample scene.
Here is the compound to create a circle in ICE :
http://www.vol2nuit.fr/guillaume/blog/ice_circle/Generate%203D%20point%20Circle.xsicompound

A sample scene using this compound and showing how to manipulate each circle using the “Circle ID” attribute : http://www.vol2nuit.fr/guillaume/blog/ice_circle/ICE_Circle_setup.scn

And a video to illustrate this compound : http://www.vol2nuit.fr/guillaume/blog/ice_circle/ice_circle.html

Update : Render Curves 1.1

The Render Curves compound needs an array of values between 0 and 1 to set the point positions along the UV coordinate of the curve.
In the first release of this tool the array was filled using a loop. In the loop, a push node was adding value to the array.

But just after the release of the compound, Helge Mathee post a video showing a very nice way to build an array of fractions of a number.
The key point is the “Get Array Sub Indices” node. You give an array to this node and it return a new array filled with the indices of the first array !

I tried the Helge Mathee way in my Render Curves compound. The only difference is that I removed the “Linear Interpolate” node as my U values are always between 0 and 1.
The creation of the array is much faster this way ! In Render Curves 1.0 it can take 30 seconds to build the “render curves” using 50 000 points. In Render Curves 1.1, using the “Get Array Sub Indices” technique it takes less than one second !

So here is the updated Render Curves compound.

Rendering Curves Compound V1

Here is a new demo video !

I just finished my ICE compound to render XSI curves. I add severals options for the curve rendering style. As it is the first realease, feel free to report me any bugs.
You can download the compound HERE ! (edit : or get the latest update HERE).

PS: If you want to see the colors in your rendering like in my video, you will need to get the Color attribute from the point cloud used to render you curve in your shader.
Select the point cloud, open the render tree. Apply an Attribute Color node. Choose the “Color” attribute in the drop down menu.

Rendering curves in XSI 7

Using the new XSI strands we can now render curves without the need to write a custom geometry shader. Clic on the picture below to see how it works.