Smear Compound

Here is the ICE compound for the smear blur effect in XSI. Currently, it only works on deformed geometry such as envelopes and cluster centers. It could easily be re-written to accommodate SRT motion as well, but all of my rigs use binding and deformers exclusively to help make it easier to bake out the animation.

Bookmark and Share

16 Responses to “Smear Compound”

  1. andy Says:

    Wow, this is awesome man, a million thanks for sharing. A while back I tried to do some limited 3d smear by manually pulling points around… a real pain to do as you can imagine. But your compound works brilliantly and so simple to use, can’t wait to apply it to some animation. Cheers!

  2. rene Says:

    im a 3d professor and i want to get into 3d again. I have been teaching 3dsmax for a few years now and im going back into xsi. i will try to tool around with this smear of yours. thanks so much. you have renewed my interest in 3d for myself again.

  3. mreis Says:

    hi! nice ice compound.
    could you please just explain where do i connect it and how i make it works??

    great work with the podcasts!! and film! heheh!!

  4. mreis Says:

    well! i just figured it out!! thanks

  5. lee Says:

    to good to be true, cant wait to see the finished short,
    and congrats on the vfx phd stuff ive hearing good things about it

    can any body tell me how to set it up please thanks

  6. Lucas Martell Says:

    Select an object and hit Alt + 9 to open the ICE tree.

    Create > Ice Tree

    Compounds > Import Compound

    Then just hook it up to port 1.

  7. lee Says:

    Thanks Lucas

  8. JD Says:

    hi. this is all just great!
    the movie, the tutorials and even the smear ice compound.
    but as i’m way not as gifted as you it’s far from beeing easy to change the compound to SRT motionblur… maybe you’ll find some time to write a few lines about this.
    anyway, you’re a great inspiration. thanks!

  9. Oscar Says:

    Great work and site !

    In what version of Softimage this was made on, because since your compound uses get data at previous frame, should be in the simulation region, but envelopes stop working when you have a simulation region active the only way I could make it work was loading in the same simulated ice tree a cache previously made and after that connect your compound wich defeats the purpose of having control on animation.

    Don’t know if something was changed in the evaluation since the version you created this on.

    Thanks in advance.

    PD I was testing on 2011 btw.

  10. Lucas Martell Says:

    Yeah this was done in v7. They changed something in 2010 that restricts the GetDataAtPreviousFrame. When it was made, that node could work as a deformer. The only other way I can think to do it would be to write out the previous frame as a cache so you could access it later, but that’s a lot less slick than this solution.

  11. Lucas Martell Says:

    Oops, sorry I meant write out the cache dynamically as part of the evaluation of that ice tree, or from a separate mesh.

  12. Oscar Says:

    Yeah, the workaround I found was duplicating the geo, and pass the deformations with get pointposition from the original to set point position of the duplicated geo, then apply the smear there.

  13. Oscar Says:

    PD Thanks for the ideas.

  14. edschiffer Says:

    hi

    i’m just trying to apply the smear in Softimge 2010 SP1, and i can’t link the Get Point Position of the enveloped mesh with the Set Point Position in the Simulated ICE Tree of the mesh to be smeared.

    the first is cylinderEnveloped.PointPosition and the second is self.PointPosition, but ICE don’t allow me to connect them. any help?

  15. Lucas Martell Says:

    Hi Ed, that has to do with the GetDataAtPreviousFrame problem referenced above. There’s a few workarounds mentioned, but all take a bit of setup on your end. If anyone can come up with a different way of doing everything in one Ice tree in 2010, let me know and I’ll post it.

  16. Ed Schiffer Says:

    hei Lucas.

    I’ve been trying here, but I’m new to ICE. The problem is with the construction stack, so i just draged the envelope to the simulation area. It doesn’t work either, but deforms. I don’t know where there could lead. just sharing a thought.

    [big thanks for all the knowledge of your podcasts! ^^]

Leave a Reply