First animation test with the Polygonise operator for ICE.

Here is the first animation test of my Polygonise operator (a C++ plugin for ICE particle clouds). I used a sample scene from the really promising ICE SPH Fluids from Thiago Costa and Grant Kot. I’m starting to work on the optimisation speed.

The major bottleneck is in the way you get values on the height points of each cubes in the 3D grid used for the marching cube algorithm. Those values are computed by a formula using  the distance between each cubes points and each ICE particles. For 30*30*30 cubes (27 000 points) and 1000 particles,  it starts to be a lot of processing.

The first optimisation I add today is a cutoff distance. The cubes points who are not in a bounding box around a particle, will not be evaluated. I put a user parameter to specifies the bounding box size of search around each particle. With this technique the meshing is much faster than before but certainly not production ready. On my old laptop with the Viscous_101 sample scene from Thiago, it takes 30 seconds to mesh 1000 particles… so I guess I need more optimisations work :p.

Anyway, I really want to push this project as far as I can.  See you soon !

Polygonise operator for ICE point clouds.

Here is my new little personal developement work, a Softimage ICE cloud mesher.  For the moment it is a raw implementation of the marching cube algorithm without any speed optimisation. I first did a simple metaball system to better understand how it works (but as there is already a metaball plugin for XSI from Michele Sandroni, I didn’t  push it to farther). Then I start this mesher operator to create a polygon surface “around” a particle field. 

 

mesh and particles

 
I’ve got a working plugin, so I can’t resist to show you a preview :
http://www.vol2nuit.fr/guillaume/Dev/Polygonise/polygoniseICEcloud_alpha1.mov

Now, I need to work on the speed for the mesh generation !

No Shame

I just found on an old hard drive a backup of one of my first 3d animation !

I was pretty sure it was lost in the final crash of my computer in 2003. Watching this little thing give me a cookie-Proust effect (I don’t think we can say this in english, so more info here http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html  ). At this time I was doing  a lot of (boring…) architectural 3d illustrations. 3D animation was most of the time just a hobby.

This one is a kind of video clip for an imaginary rock band. Modeling and rendering was done in LightWave 6.0, animation in Project:Messiah and compositing in Combustion 1.0. 

I must admit that the character animation is closer to an animatic than a polished final shot… Anyway, I put it on youtube without shame !