XSI ICE "Harmonic Motion" compound

Today I decided to make an ICE compound (honestly my first useful one) that creates an oscillating “harmonic” effect. This is useful for creating pulses of different amplitudes and frequencies for various point parameters (i.e. position, or scale). Simply attach the input you want to oscillate to the input and set the same value as the output position. There are other parameters for isolating the effect to a specific axis as well. Once the compound is installed it can be found under the “Simulation” section of ICE tools.

“Harmonic Motion” ICE compound

I encourage you to find any flaws or if you can make it faster please do so and let me know. Please feel free to email me at JonathanK.Kelly@gmail.com with any comments or questions!

Quick Rendering Tip #1

An ambient occlusion pass can help you determine if your geometry has overlapping faces or not!

A synopsis of my Cut & Paste 2011 qualifier that took place at the Soho House in New York City.

Fluid cloud test

I posted an image recently of some clouds I’m working on for this fly-by idea I’m realizing. Shortly after I posted the image a friend asked me how you would go about creating large billowing clouds (the kind you see from and airplane). A quick answer would be “just create a large fluid container and adjust the Perlin texture”. That solution only leads you to extremely long and painful render times, trust me……please. The key is to keep the fluid contain as small as possible (in the Y direction) probably in the 2 to 5 scale and scale up the noise texture. Also, when scaling up the texture you’re going to need to play around with the frequency ratio to gain some of the “lumps” back into your clouds.

This is the previous image with scale adjustments as well as other adjustments to make it less dense.

Fluid clouds v2

Here is a quick render of some clouds I’m doing for a small fly by animation (don’t you just love fly-by’s. I’m juggling this one with the Becks beer project. This is a little easier because everything is being done in Maya (in terms of the animation).

Particles instances

The following is a still render from a short animation I’m working on entitled “P.I.L.L” It’s an “abstract” piece heavy on particles (I love particles). Content is being created with Maya and maybe some After Effects (probably After Effects).