Computer Graphics, Linux and Everything…

After some tests with Arnold, we quickly realized we didn’t need Vue anymore for stuff like scattering trees on a landscape. An artist at Oblique asked me to create a compound in ICE to mimic the parameters in Vue to scatter particles with some rules. Here is the compound. It’s quickly done but it works.

FL_ScatterTool.1.3.xsicompound.zip

edit: It appears the Density_Map isn’t working. I’ll have to find some time to fix it.

I needed to load some DEM file into Softimage and Polytrans didn’t like the DEM flavor I had in hands. I wrote my own script to import it and happily ended up with a very hires model of the Rocky Mountains to scale. One Softimage unit equals 1 kilometer.

When I get the camera very close to the geometry, the mountains look good. Their shape looks normal and the slopes feel right. However, when I frame all the geometry in the viewport, the mountains look flat and boring. I have to scale them up 5 times in Y to get them to look nice again.

I made a linear camera movement from far to close and keyframed the Y scaling parameter from 5 to 1 linearly as well to see if it would present any apparent change. To my surprise, it’s not very apparent.