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).