Integer.....

Integers

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Are equally spaced points along a number line, like the one above.

They are considered natural numbers(positive and negative ones), which means they can't be 0.321, or -0.6123.

                                                 In math their symbol looks like ---->

which stands for Zahlen, a German word which means Numbers. O_O 

Now in ICE, an Integer looks like:

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 Its Ports are dark green, and it can only put out "whole numbers", 1, -1, 0 ect.

A really good way to keep NaNs. and Inf. out of your ICE trees is to try and round all the Scalar values you can to Integers. Or so I've found.

Integers are our friends, Yeah!

Vector and his little brother Scalar

So to understand Vectors and Scalars all you need is some....

AND some...

I'm just KIDDING :D *but you do need physics*

Vector - Magnitude and direction

Scalar - Magnitude 

NASA, sums it up like this...

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In ICE as in physic's this is probably one of the most basic, and the most important concepts to understand,- or at least I believe it is - there are many data types in ICE(integers, Boolean etc.) But these two are my favorites.
In ICE Vectors get used for push, direction change, forces and motion blur.
This is what some of the math involved looks like...

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Scalars on the other hand get used for scaling values, speed,mass and so on. *On a side note the word scalar comes from the Latin word ladder, and the English word scale.*
 So what do these guys look like in ICE,
the scalar....

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has green ports and can accept any real numbers. (eg. 0.88 or -11.234)
and the vector....

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has yellow ports and can either be a 2D vector, 3D vector or 4D vector depending on what you choose,
these are point positions in Euclidean space.

Just a random thought

Velocity....

While busy at work, I noticed that my understanding of Velocity when compared to other people, wasn't the same.  So, I'm going to do a little simple tutorial on Velocity soon, just to see how the math/physic's look in ICE.

I will be updating this post over the weekend or so.

:D

SO what is Velocity?

Velocity: the speed and direction of an object, or its rate of change in position. This is a vector.

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/index.html

SO according to ICE, Velocity has to do with . . . "position", "direction" , and "change in position which = speed/rate"

And the formula for Velocity looks like this :

or.....

which basically means Velocity = Displacement( "position", "direction") divided by change in time("change in position which = speed/rate")

a.k.a change in position over a change in time


Finding the rate or speed:

You might be thinking how can I find out what the rate or speed of said strand/particle/point is? Speed is a Scalar value, this means it has direction over time but not a position as with velocity/vectors.

Here is the formula for speed/rate:

Some cool Tutorials on Velocity\speed and acceleration can be found here:
http://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics


too be continued..... :D

Making a turbulence fall off along a strand

Got a Comment from Chris on fall offs for turbulence, Sorry for the late replay been hectic at work(and diablo :D)

But anyway, straight to it then.

Bring into your Ice Tree the TF_Frizz_Strands_by_Turbulence node, it looks like this:

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Now to add the fall off you will have to go inside the compound and add the following nodes:

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Basically what you are doing is multiplying the turbulence with the fcurve, where its value is zero there will be no turbulence, where the value is 1(1.5) there will be turbulence.

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So before the fall off it looked like-----

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And after ------

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Hope that helps with your project Chris :D

Cool Post from the Simon

Alo blog,

just a link to my friend Simons blog, quite a cool post he put up

http://vinyldevelopment.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/debugging-your-rigs-scene/


:D

DIABLO 3

Alo blog,

Got Diablo 3 sooooooo been playing that, and probably will for sometime. Will get back to exploring ice as soon as I get tired of killing Zombies and stuff :D

over and out

Fur, Feathers, and Scales

Fur, Feathers, and scales

The last year or so I have been making lots of the above mentioned. And now after all my suffering I would love to build these systems for myself, so that if I EVER have to use them again that I would be ready and prepared ..... kinda.

I'm going to use my blog as a way to keep track of everything I learn and everything I try sooooo Hopefully it will help me not get distracted too much.

To start:

I have been using a combination of melena, normal soft strands, and 3dquacks verlet integration to make Khumba's fur. I found this to be an "ok" way to make fur, but it is heavy and "jittery". So I'm hoping to improve on this.

The feathers are melena but with a huge twist, and the scales is a whole new system i made on the fly so these two need the most work :D

Yeah for ICE \:D/

Vector Fields and simple Math

Alo blog :D

Last night while waiting for some feather stuff for work to render, I played with a Vector visualizer I got from a cool guy named  Fabricio Chamon. Well at fist I was just messing around with normal turbulence and then I fed some curves through it, but I got bored :D so I got a thinking what simple math would look like in there. What a lot of fun I had doing that..... this weekend I want to put some images up for you all to see. Best way ever to make new and interesting forces.

O here is an example of the math

y = x^2 * z^2

Back to Vector Fields

Just an update on this subject. :D

I found Exocortex/Slipstream yesterday and boy how cool is their use of Vector Fields, I'm so green with Envy right now. Will be learning as much as I can from their system, obviously.

http://www.exocortex.com/plugins/slipstreamvx

On my wish list of things I really want to be able to make. XD

Fur Nodes using Melena Base for Khumba

Alo again :D

Here are the Compounds I made and used to create the fur,feathers and Scales for Khumba the Movie.
P.S. It needs melena as a base. Hopefully when I'm done with the whole system it wont need that any more as I found that the curve sets it creates are super heavy. Any way here is the link......

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8MfxqvWZh32dXd5ZnV5ZFpEWnM/edit

Just a note, I'm still a noob at Ice in general sooooo, just saying :D

Enjoy