Sixbirds PixelParticles 1.0
Hey folks,
time to release another plugin under the flag of Sixbirds Barcelona!
As already shown in a teaser video on vimeo.
Sixbirds Rigging Solvers (UPDATE V1.3)
Hey folks!
Edit: I upgraded the addon to version 1.3, see the 13th solver for new description of the Nulls 2 Nurbssurface.
Constant passes without constant materials
Recently we had to face this interesting problem: extracting a constant pass out of an arbitrarely complex rendertree.
Sixbirds Rigging Solvers
Hey folks!
So finally after a good first round here at Sixbirds in Spain we decided to release some of the tools we are using for production to the community.
PPG Based Particle Animation Work Flow With ICE
About a year ago already, XSI 7.0 was released with much expectations and enthusiasm.
Fast Radiosity using Diffuse convolved environment map
What you need to reproduce theses examples :
HDRShop
HDRShop plugin Diffuse_SH.
I used to work for a 2 years at Framestore-CFC in London. That mean I use Maya and PRMan as my main application.
Decorating your Python code
I have touched on Python decorators in the past in this article (although that decorator was a bit convoluted).
Logging and being proactive
You write tools for artists under a deadline (yours and theirs). You live in a production oriented world.
Gerstner Waves 102
During the Gerstner Wave 101 video I alluded to stacking multiple waves together to create more complex surfaces.
Gerstner Waves 101
With the set of Gerstner Waves available for purchase it was obvious that there should be some usage videos posted here so here is the first one describing how to install it and the basic parameters.
Gerstner Waves for sale
After some hard work and some great feedback from a few people I've decided to put my Gerstner wave compounds up for sale.
At their current price of 40$ they're a steal, as far as I'm concerned.
Why settle for one Python when you can have two
For the first time I was confronted this week with running XSI 32bits and XSI 64bits on the same Windows x64 system.
ICE Kinematics
Quite a few people have been asking how the unsupported feature of ICE Kinematics can be enabled in XSI.
Gerstner Waves in ICE
Here is me playing around with Gerstner waves in XSI's ICE.
For about the past five years I've been doing pipeline stuff. ICE has gotten me yearning for production work again.
Previewing Shadowmaps
It is sometimes desirable to be able to check the shadow maps look.
Since XSI does not allow for shadow maps paths, this is how you can do (a ray3 standalone license is required).
Slickening up the build cycle for compiled plugins
1. compile with copy, 2. oops, error, file in use, 3. switch to XSI, 4. dig down and unload plugin, 5. switch to VS, 6. compile . yaddda .. you know the drill.
Vista Trick : Symbolic Links
It's possible to create symbolic links in Windows Vista just like in Unix. This is helpful if you need to make a directory or file appear to be in different location.
Dynamic Callbacks In Plugins
I really like applications that provide rich SDKs for it's users to play around with. I also like event based systems and callbacks.
Proxy Select And Anticipating A Users Needs
Two weeks ago Bryan Blevins, CG Supervisor at Wild Canary, asked a question on the Softimage Net community about the possibility of doing proxy selects.
Bump Filtering in the Rendertree
The current bump node (formerly known as zbump) became very popular for its simplicity, and for its ability to get procedural textures as inputs.
Object oriented programming, once again.
So the keen folks at the german XSI forum (http://www.xsiforum.de) discussed the topic of generating separate objects out of all of the polygon islands making up a polygonmesh.
An alternative to XSIs tail spring op
Hey gang,
working on some characters with secondary motion I came up with a pretty simple spring op including some caching / plotting functionality and thought I'd share it.
