Edit: Unfortunately I had to cut out  two of the clips until they can be released to the public. I will re-upload them as soon as possible…

It was more of a live action/compositing heavy project. The only thing I did was the car made of lightstrokes at about 00:37. But given the fact that I had only a few days to create the whole setup in ICE it turned out quite nice.

Clariant Brand Movie

Deutsche Fernsehlotterie “Paper World”

Deutsche Fernsehlotterie Paper World Making Of

• Replace shaders: will replace all instances of the same shader by a new one. You have options which will help you to keep all connections in and out of the shaders intact. Additionally you can set parameters in the newly created shader, either directly or based on parameter values of the old shader.

• Insert shader: insert a new shader between a specified connection. Similar to replace shaders you have options to keep all connections intact and additionally set parameters in the new shader. You can also use this to simply import and connect a shader without inserting it into an existing connection.

• Set Shader Parameters: allows you to set parameters of all kinds in a target shader.

The first version of my Mia Material Advanced shader used to be a compound. But soon I found out about an annoying  softimage bug which caused a massive slowdown prior to rendering when using shader compounds with a lot of exposed parameters. So I developed a new version which packed all the functionality into one shader phenomena. Unfortunately we had used the compound already in several projects and assets which we had to reuse later on. So I created the initial version of the script, which I used to replace all the Mia Advanced compounds in a scene with the new shader phenomena, while keeping all connections intact. I really liked the performance of the script and so I decided to massively extend it in my spare time, to make it work in all kinds of  possible situations.

So why use this? It’s maybe not the most user friendly way to work with materials, but there are many cases I can think of where this plugin could prove extremely useful. As described above, Replace Shaders can easily update shaders to a newer or better version. Another nice possibility would be to quickly convert entire scenes to work with different render engines like VRay or Arnold. A combination of Replace Shaders and Insert Shader could be used to create complex render channel setups you might not have thought of before creating your materials. And Set Shader Parameters can of course become handy in all sorts of situations. Enable Elliptical filtering or change texture repeats in all your image nodes. Or increase sampling values in all your illumination shaders at once…

Here is a small help page I’ve set up to describe in detail the various functions of the plugin. You can also call this help page directly from the plugins help button:

MM ShaderTools HELP

Download MM_ShaderTools

The archive contains the plugin, plus some presets I’ve been using so far. One more word of advice: since the plugin can massively change or even remove stuff from your materials it’s heavily recommended to save your scene before running the script. And since it proved very complex to handle all possible exceptions (especially concerning shader compounds) there might very well be some bugs left. So use it at your own risk and in case you encounter any problems don’t hesitate to email me and I will see what I can do.

Have fun and let me know if you like the plugin!

Cluster to Weightmap

As the name implies it converts clusters to weightmaps. Whats nice though is that it accept all types of clusters (point,polygon,edge) and adds the ability to grow and/or smooth the resulting weightmap.
Remember that you have to create the weightmap before you create the Icetree to make this work.

Download Cluster to Weightmap

Create Copies along Curve

I don’t think there is an easy way to do this with the build-in topology compounds plus it has some other nice features:

• supports both open and closed curves
• nice controls to interactively position, scale and rotate your copies on the curve
• copies will be evenly spaced along the curve
• the copies nicely align to the curve, you shouldn’t run into any problems with flipping normals on s-shaped curves.
• transfers UV’s

The compound isn’t terribly fast, but that’s more due to the lack of speed of ICE topology in general. But I still think it’s very useful for a lot of modeling tasks. Like extracting a curve from a railing and quickly distribute posts for example. For everything else I would try to stick with instances…

Download Create Copies along Curve

Neural Net

Another take on motiongraphics currently most popular effect: emits particles and connects them with strands. This one is

• pretty fast
• works both in a simulated and non-simulated environment
• two modes of stand creation: closest points & random
• turbulice and grow the strands

Here is a quick viewport capture of  750 particles being emited per second, each growing 30 connections to its neighbours:

Most of the detail gets lost in compression unfortunately, so you can’t really see the individual connections growing. But its still a good example what you can do with the compound.

Download Neural Net

Emit from Polygons

This compound is thought to be used in a non-simulated environment and the emitter mesh should ideally consist of quads only. The idea behind this compound was to quickly create coral like structures by emitting instances from polygon centers and scaling them according to the polygon they’ve been emited from. This helps to prevent instances from penetrating each other, and also results in a more natural, organic look.

Since some of the parameters are not as obvious as in the other compounds i will explain them quickly:

Scale XZ by polygon size affects how much the instances will be squeezed based on the emiter polygon. A value of 1 means the particles are completely squeezed, 0 means no squeezing happens.

Note that we’re not actually skewing the particles, since that’s not possible. We’re only scaling them according to the distance between the two opposite edges of a quad.

Y Min/Max specify the range the next two operations work in. If they’re set to zero, the particles Y scale will be set to min+max/2.

Scale Y by polygon size does the same thing as the XZ feature. The higher the value, the smaller in Y will instances emited from small polygons become.

Scale Y by Curvature additionally scales Y by taking the curvature of the mesh into account. Instances lying on concave surfaces will scale down, while convex ones scale up.

The instancing part allows you to directly pick a group of different meshes to instantiate. You can then finetune which instance will appear via a turbulence. Bigger turbulence means bigger fields of the same instance will appear. You need to specify the correct number of different instances to make it work.

Download Emit from Polygons

Quantize Values

This one is a bit techy, but proved useful to me. It takes a set or array of scalar values and spits out quantized values based on a quantization step. An image (hopefully) explains more than thousand words

You could use this to create stepped gradient effects or stop-motion like animation.

Download Quantize Values

So I decided to quickly write a small script which does the job: you can either select or branch select objects in your scene, run the command, and it will keep all VISIBLE objects in your selection which fit the currently selected filter. If you hold down shift, it will also select HIDDEN objects which match the filter.

Installation:

Put the script into Application\plugins of your user or workgroup folder. Hit “Update All” in the plugin manager or restart softimage. The script will register a new command called MM_FilterSelection at the bottom of your “Select” menu in the upper right corner

Download MM_FilterSelection