Next step on from meshcrawling particles (here) was going to be some loose motion control using curves to control flow of particles over the surface. But then I got to thinking that maybe proper flocking, a la Craig Reynolds (see here) might not be so hard and, since the crawler node was designed to work within the particle sim loop, I could design it as a general purpose flocking tool and still have it work with the mesh tool.

(Click to Enlarge)Some time ago I was asked to work out a method for animating many thousands of characters across arbitrarilly complex surfaces. The solution turned out to be surprisingly simple but the nature of pre-7.0 particles made it a bit messy in practice so it seemed natural to have a stab at making it work in ICE.

A video of the animation can be found here

The XSI Resources Index is a full list of links to the CGI tools, plugins, tutorials and articles available on this site. Nearly all of these resources are for Softimage's 3D animation application XSI (www.Softimage.com for details)

I do this partly for fun but mostly to keep my head from turning to mush and because I just can't stop. Everything's free, If you like what you use send me a pizza. Or a million dollars. Or a car. I like cars.

I finally got around to building the Tiny modelling tools for 64 bit, at the same time combining them into one addon that works for both 32 and 64 bit. For those of you that have been waiting, my apologies, for those that haven't, well, you don't care anyway. The addon contains TinyMeshTools and combines TinyThickness, TinyCurveExtrude, TinyPusher, TinyMeshDeform. TinyPusher is undocumented but, in a nutshell, it deforms a geometry using either a curve or a point deformer. TinyPusher can be found under the Model->Modify->PolyMesh menu. It prompts for picks, follow the instructions in the status bar at the bottom of xsi.

Further information about the other tools in the set can be found in the relevant pages listed here. I'll document Pusher as soon as I can.

You can get the download here.

A series of Camtasia video tutorials. I did these such a long time ago, back in version 3.5 I think but they're still relevant, particularly for anyone coming to XSI and the rendertree for the first time. I've tried to concentrate on techniques, basic blocks on which you can build rather than trying to be too specific.

The Tiny tools for XSI continue to grow. Right now we're up to 4. TinyCurveExtrude and TinyThickness augment XSI's basic extrusion tools, TinyMeshMapper uses Juan Brockhuse's elegant and clever technique for using UVs to deform geometry onto a polygonal mesh and development of TinyCap, which closes holes in meshes with profiled caps, is expecting a more useful release in the coming weeks. There's also a Roadkill plugin for XSI. Roadkill is the open source UV unwrapper originally built into Blender.

All of these tools significantly extend XSI's built in tools. Find out more here