Convex Hull Using CGAL Library

Although Guillaume Laforge has posted the definitive Convex Hull node for ICE, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and hook into the CGAL geometry library and see if it was possible to use their Convex Hull (Qhull) algorithm in an ICE node. It turned out to be relatively straightforward. The Addon and C++ source is here (2013SP1, 64bit only. Only tested on a couple of machines, let me know if there are any floating dependencies I may have missed).

More Even Spacing

Softimage 2012 gave us the ability to create ICE Attributes directly via scripting and populate them with data. Guillaume Laforge used this ability extensively in CrowdFX and I've recently been using it as a mechanism to easily store large datasets in place of Blobs (e.g. for storing animated curve data from Flame GMasks).

As a simple example, I created a script which takes an input curve and creates an ICE Attribute on that curve containing evenly-spaced point positions. The relationship is 'live' so you can manipulate the curve and alter the number of evenly spaced 'ICE' points. You could then go on to feed that ICE data into another ICE tree.

In the same archive I've also included a script to generate a 'real' curve with a live link to the original curve - the new curve has evenly spaced points* and can be any degree you choose and/or constrained to the original. (*This even spacing becomes more accurate the higher your resolution).

The archive is here.

Using Generate Sample Set to Avoid Repeat Loops

Oleg Bliznuk, the author of Exocortex's Implosia FX, posted a tip for avoiding repeat loops a few months back using Generate Sample Set. It's a great tip and one which can generate good time savings over repeat loops. I wanted to test just how much of a saving the tip could provide by calculating a cumulative sum array i.e. given an array of integers, produce another array which gave you the cumulative sum of all elements in the array at any given point.

The conventional way to do that would be to use a simple repeat loop, but as is always the case with ICE, repeat loops are not necessarily the best way to achieve your desired results as ICE's multithreading isn't optimised in that scenario.

Oleg's brilliantly lateral idea was to generate a sample for each array member and create an array on that sample the same size as the element's index. You can then populate that array with all the members of your original array up to that point and perform tasks on that segment of the original array.

I decided to set up a test scene to compare the performance of a conventional repeat loop and Oleg's  method. In that test scene, Oleg's method was twice as fast as a repeat loop which is a significant gain.

But, there is a downside -  you pay in RAM usage, sometimes to the point where you might end up paging memory. In my sample scene, the repeat loop method used 200Mb RAM for an array of size 50k whereas in the Generate Sample Set scene RAM  usage shot up to nearly 10 Gigabytes!  The stepping in terms of RAM usage relative to array size (on my machine) went: 5,000: 373Mb; 10,000: 849Mb; 20,000: 2.6Gig; 30,000: 5.5Gig and so on. It looks like there's a step in RAM usage between 10,000 and 20,000 although I'm guessing this might be machine dependent.

It's clear that if you're going to use this method in a compound you need to be careful about the maximum array size you're going to allow and possibly switch over to a conventional repeat loop over a certain threshold.

If you'd like to play with the scene or do your own timings to verify these results it can be downloaded here along with the Cumulative Array Sum compound (2013 SP1).

ICE Modeled Camera Grid

I was way too slow to post this compound to the XSI Mailing list in response to a thread on the creation of a camera plane but here it is anyway! It dynamically creates an ICE modeled grid and places it inside the camera frustum at a specified distance from the camera. At the same time it creates an ICE-based texture projection. Sample scene and compound is here.

Filtering Arrays

Stephen Blair has been posting some great articles on the eX-SI Support Blog about how to create array patterns i.e ordered sequences like (0,1,2,3,0,1,2,3) or (0,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2). The creation of this type of sequence can be useful in creating  the points of a grid and also for avoiding the use of repeat loops in certain circumstances.

On the XSI mailing list a few weeks back Dan Yargici posted a question about how to reconfigure a simple non-regular pattern like (1,1,5,5,5,5,8,9,9,9,10,10) into (1,1,2,2,2,2,3,4,4,4,5,5). In the resultant thread Martin Chatterjee came back with a brilliant solution without using repeats. Martin's solution touched on some of the inherent functionality in ICE arrays that's worth expanding upon.

I'm going to try and illustrate some of these with a sample scene that contains an ICE tree that shows several different methods for firstly creating a pattern array and then using that pattern to manipulate an array. If that all sounds abstract it's based on Dan's problem above but with the added wrinkle that the initial pattern is not numerically ascending i.e. it looks something like this: (8,8,2,2,2,14,3,3,1,16,11,11).