July 2011

Jul 31 2011

ICE destruction

31/07/2011 | Comments: 2 | Posted by: madsen | In: ICE, Softimage XSI, Tutorial

Whether it’s alien lasers, judgment day prophecies or just that really cool thingy that will self-destruct messages in five seconds, having a tool that can turn an object into dust for whatever reason can certainly become handy in the VFX demanding times of today. Anyone who has ever worked on a VFX shot knows that the second you start relaying on key framing the effect by hand the chances of the director all of a sudden changing his mind and want it to go in another direction is one hundred percent. And that is if we’re being optimistic. So the goal is to design a tool that is flexible enough to change the object getting disintegrated and the factor setting of the effect without relying on you manually setting keyframes.

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Jul 05 2011

Create dimples when particles collide with the surface

05/07/2011 | Comments: 0 | Posted by: madsen | In: ICE, Softimage XSI, Tutorial
Just a few years ago (or versions of Softimage if you will) this type of effect would require a fair amount of time and patience and certainly wasn’t something you would whisk together in three little steps. By using ICE there’s actually very little information you need to extract from the scene in order to create the dimples. You obviously need to find the whereabouts of the particles and the points on the geometry you want to dent but that’s about it.
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