I Finally got around to knocking out Camtasia tutorials following the initial flocking tryout in the previous blog entry. I've split it into two parts; theory - lots of drawing vectors on whiteboards, explaining how these simple flocks work and practice - how to get it going in ICE.

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

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, TinyCap. 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.

TinyCap is a relatively new addition to the set, it caps holes in meshes with optional curve profiles. TinyCap is also undocumented and there is, as yet, no menu entry for it but you can run it with the command ApplyTinyCap( Mesh, ProfileCurve ). By omitting the second argument the profile curve will be ignored and you'll get a plain old vanilla hole cap.

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.

A comprehensive and feature rich XSI plugin for sweeping one or more profile curves along a single curve

TinyCurveExtrude is an XSI plugin that extrudes curves along curves, much the same as XSI’s own curve extrude tool but with some added bells and whistles (see features below).

Tinythickness is an XSI custom operator that takes a polygonal mesh surface and gives it thickness by sweeping a profile around it's boundary edges. The profile can be  defined either by a curve or by adjusting profile parameters in the operator's property page.  30 day free evaluation available.

This plugin is now free!

Roadkill is a UV unwrapper heavily based on the unwrapper used in Blender.  Roadkill For XSI is a plugin that interfaces with Roadkill to let you unwrap UVs directly in XSI. Cut lines are marked in XSI by selecting edges prior to unwrapping. You can unwrap UVs with a single click or have XSI have Roadkill start up in GUI mode and unwrap interactively.

TinyMeshDeform is an XSI plugin that uses an object's UV coordinates to deform geometry onto a polygon mesh surface.

Tinymeshdeform is based on an idea developed by Juan Brockhaus at Glassworks. Glassworks and Juan have very kindly agreed to allow this plugin to be distributed to other XSI users.

If you're running even a small network it's important you keep consistancy in your addons, plugins and shaders across all your machines. Setting up workgroups is the way to do this but running from machine to machine, firing up XSI and setting each workgroup, even using the command line  is tiresome and slow. Unless you read this article.