www.si-community.com

Hi ICE gurus. I am a newbie to ICE strands and ICE.

The ICE strands' full length shows up all at once which looks pretty bad. I think there is a way to make the strands appear more gently. My limited knowledge of ICE isn't helping me at all. I want to hide the bend of the strands that happens near the particle emmision area. Not sure if I am able to properly express myself.

Please help.

You have the strand length in Emit Strands isn't it?

how are you getting on? here is a very simple way to grow strands so you only have to keyframe the attribute strandlength. there are many ways to grow strands, depends on what you want to achieve, the easiest would be to have them generate trails from a moving position - and easy to control particles this way. which ways have you tried so far?

Just create them in one cloud and then use the strand array to gradually add or subtract array enries to make them grow or shrink. This way you can presimulate strands and cache the results. Them you just add the results to your visible strands.


I'm sure somebody else explained it much better then me before.

Hi thanks for the response.

I don't want to see the hanging area of the strands. I wish to see a strand reach it's full length gradually, right now a strand reach it's full length as soons as a particle is emitted which causes the hanging thingy

I have somewhat reduced the hanging effect by using the bend strands compound with that I have made it less noticeable.

Please help.

I guess that because you generate the strand the moment the particle is generated. As far as I can tellyou expect some dynamics to show up which shape the strands. Strands are just point positions. You'd generate a strand if simulated on the fly by adding entries to the strand position array. THis way it grows. You just put the whole strand in place and expect it to follow something. Don't know if the follow trajectory node should do this, but there are other strand compound which grow the strand. Just take a look at the available ice nodes.

In your case just use "Generate Strand Trails" instead of normal Strands.

@Helli. I was just doing that while you were posting. But now I can't use the Strand Sin Wave Compound to get the wriggling movement. Any help. I want this kind of effect. Got this with the previous ICE tree.

Thanks.

You should try to bend your head around what's happening in your ICE tree and what strands are and/or how they work.

In the end strandPosition is just an array with point entries. But as it is not any array, but the strand array these points can be used to render strands.

If you need to animate these positions there are several ways. I'd recommend to copy the strand position array and then write deformed positions back into the strandPosition array. These way you can save a master position array (like your point moved during animation) and then use this as a reference for you deformations.

so had a look at the very interesting ubertag 2011 video with Mr Tim Borgmann presenting. very very good stuff. thanks to all (again) for doing this and sharing. Ive seen it when it came out but sadly never tried to do any of the ICE trees. here is a cheeky teasing render from last night for Caveman with trying to get the bits from 14.:00 onwards. growing networks and strands - he demonstrated it with a null but Ive just keyframed the growth. really simple stuff apart from the flipping of strand direction , just need to set the particle positions to 0 and it works!



if you are still stuck I can explain these two aspects of strands now

Hi Pancho will you please guide me how to extract the strand position array, so I can apply a sin wave motion.

Thanks.

Just take a get data node with self.strandposition

strandposition is allready your array of positions on the strands (or to be more precise it's a set which means it contains 1 array of strand positions for every point).
Try to feed this into a turbulize around value node and the result just feed into a set.data node with self.strandposition

play around a bit ;)

Yep, just take a get data node and plug it into a setdata node. self.strandposition (get) into self.initialStrandPosition (set)

now you can use the initial strand position (get), turbulize it and write it back to self.strandPosition. This way you won't loose the original strand position.

You could set the initial strand position in the modeling stack and then simulate it with turbulize in the animation stack, but that really depends on how you are working and how you get hold of the strand positions in the first place.

Hi Tekano didn't see your post earlier. By all means please explain, I am always ready to learn more.


Hi Helli, Pancho. Thanks for the guidance. Is there a way to filter out the root region of the Strand Trail from getting Turbulized.
I was looking for a way to put sine wave motion in place of the turbulize compound.

Thanks.

Use the position in the array and the total number of entries in the array to linearly blend the effect. pos in array/total entries = blend amount.

Hi Pancho did you mean StrandPosition divided by StrandCount And where to connect the result in the Turbulize Around Value?