If you want to use particular attributes for working with strands, see Strand Attributes for more information.
Particle strands are solid shape trails that are drawn after a particle. These solid shapes are actually continuous segments of the shape that you have chosen for the particle, such as spheres, rectangles, boxes, discs, or even blobs. Strands makes it easy to create effects that require more solid-looking objects than trails, such as ribbons, seaweed, or hair, and much more.
Strands do not create a new set of particles as spawning does, which are also sometimes known as particle trails (see Spawning ICE Particles).
Using the numerous Strands compounds, you have a lot of control over the appearance and movement of strands to create many types of particle effects. The Create Strands and Generate Strand Trails compounds are the two main compounds you can use to actually create the strands. Because these two compounds create strands in different ways, you can use only one of them at a time in the same ICE tree.
• Create Strands is the basic compound that creates particle strands—see Creating Strands for information.
• Generate Strand Trails lets you dynamically generate particle strands based on the length of the simulation and a limited number of segments, such as for “growing” things like grass or vines—see Generating Strand Trails for information.
Once you have created or generated strands, you can use any of the following compounds in conjuction with either the Create Strands or Generate Strand Trails compound to change the strand behavior:
• Bend Strand/Bend Strand Towards Vector compounds bend the strands along an axis or towards a vector—see Bending Particle Strands for information.
• Twist Strands compound twists the strand around an axis—see Twisting Strands for information.
• Turbulize Strands compound uses turbulence to create random movement along a strand—see Turbulizing Strands for information.
• Strand Sine Wave Movement compound uses sine waves to create movement along a strand—see Moving Strands with Sine Waves for information.
You can use the Strand compounds on their own or as part of a more extensive effect via the state system. To use them within a state system, plug any of their Execute outputs into an appropriate Execute port in a State compound. See ICE Particle States for information on states.
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If you want to use particular attributes for working with strands, see Strand Attributes for more information. |
You can view the strands as trails in the 3D view if you set the particle display type to Segment in the Particle Display property editor (see Displaying ICE Particles). The Segment shape draws a line from each point position through each strand position point. You can easily simulate hair using this shape type.
If you want to see what the strands will look like rendered using any shape type, however, you need to draw a render region.
Strands automatically have UVs applied to them so that they can be textured. The UV assignment is slightly different depending on the shape type you’ve set for the strands, but you can see what they look like if you apply an image node directly to them in the render tree.
You can render strands using standard Softimage surface shaders (such as Phong, Lambert, etc.), or you can render volumetric strands with a special Particle Strand Gradient shader compound, as well as with Strand options in the Particle Density shader (in conjunction with the Particle Volume Cloud shader). See ICE Particle Shading for more information on these shaders.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5