Been playing with ICE for the last couple of days. Still not too experienced with it.
Trying to tackle a small problem here. What would be the best way of creating a large amount of paper flying around in the wind and deforming correctly.
The motion of the paper looks good already, its the deformation (bending to flow in the wind) thats eluding me.
Hope someone has a good idea of how to do this ;)

So how are you generating your geometry?

Right now I guess you will need to create a couple of grids yourself by merging?

I would create a couple of predefined deforms (radial, linear etc) for the paper and blend them via ICE with each other, dependant of the normal direction towards wind direction.

My idea was to use a bend deformer on an instanced grid, to test with, and use the velocity of a particle in the Y-axis to drive the angle of the bend deformer. But Im having trouble getting to terms with the point/object context.

If I could get that working, I would set up a multitute of different deformers, and hopefully set up something that would spawn a new grid object every time a new particle was created, to make sure that all the deformed grids were unique.

Dont know if this is even viable.

ok, so one fact at first:

when you instance an object, you instance its final shape, not the full operator graph. this means that you can’t change a bend deformer per instance of an object.

the only thing you can do is time offset the shape per instance, meaning if you animate a sequence let say of 300 frames given different deformations you can offset the timing for each instance and that way make them look different.

the other approach is to have a mesh which actually includes all instances of the paper and then deform each one individually. this setup however is a lot more complex and requires a huge mesh.

hope this helps.

Yup, Im aware that it uses the current shape of the instance, which is why I want to create a mesh for every particle spawned (about 200 in total, so its not that heavy). I then group all of them and get the ID of a particle and the mesh with the same ID will react to that one particle.
Anyways, Ill set up animations for each state the mesh should be in and use the state machine to select the correct animation cycle. Gonna be a nightmare to set up, but I guess its the only way.

Would be awesome if I could output the strands as curves and use them as deformers, but I guess I can only dream.

actually, you can. with a custom plugin only though. this has been sitting on my machine for a while, I guess it’s time to publish it finally. give me some time, I’ll cook something up.

ok Soeren,

check this thread:

http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?p=16361#post16361

The third example does a similar setup ( I didn’t want to solve 100% of your issue :) ),

I hope this helps,

Helge

Not at home right now, but Ill take a look at it as soon as I get there.
Cheers Helge :D