XSIBlog

It’’s like baking a cake, right? You just put the right ingredient together and then you let the machine do the work!… Well, not quite…

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Some of you may remember the Histogram plugin that I wrote for XSI’s rendertree. It’s a tool for visualising exactly what is happening in your shading networks and can be invaluable when trying to find out why your shader is behaving unexpectedly.
Since the Histogram display window is just a COM application launched by the equivalent [...]

I was recently assigned on a particle recipe that was going to be used by several people on several shots. After some thinking on how I was going to approach the idea, I realized that I needed a few features missing in XSI. In fact, I”ve been wanting those features many times in the past. I decided to take the time to write some scripted events, even though I was on a tight deadline. It turned out it was easier than I thought.

The Piccolo language has this neat little function called AddPropertyTable which you can call on pretty much any object. This attaches a table of userdefined properties on the object that you can then fill with whatever you wish. This table of course goes whereever the object goes and is accessible through dot notation.

I use this profusely, especially with my actors. This way I can tack on actor characteristics (i.e.: agression level, strength, sight distance, etc) and refer to these characteristics later in the code.

I’m currently winding down on this Behavior project that has been making me loose sleep. I’m at the stage where I need to create my data for my multiple render passes….
Warning: If you’ve never used Behavior before or don’t care for crowd sim, skip this one. If you care for a stupid Behavior trick… Read [...]

A whole lot of time can be wasted by tweeking a parameter in XSI when you don’t know the units it’s expressed in. This is especially true in simulation.
Simulations
You can deduce the units of a parameter rapidly with only a few tries. The Age of a particle is expressed in seconds, not frames. The Size [...]