SIMULATION, DYNAMICS AND HAIR

XSI lets you simulate nearly any kind of natural (or unnatural) phenomenon. From new ICE particles to realistic hair, fur and cloth, rigid bodies and soft bodies, simulations help bring your scenes to life. Easily configured collisions, and natural forces like wind, gravity, and turbulence, add realism to your simulations. Because all simulations happen directly in the XSI interface, you can take full advantage of all modeling, shading, texturing and animation tools, and render your simulations interactively, at full quality.

ICE PARTICLES

The new ICE particle toolset features over 200 presets that you can start using immediately to create just about any particle effect imaginable. You can create complex particle behaviours such as fireworks and trails, collision, bouncing, sliding, obstacle avoidance, particle goals and even rigid body dynamics using PhysX, and modify them to suit the needs of your production. You can even instance geometry with particles to create complex effects such as crowd simulations, trees and grass.

A crowd-type particle simulation created with ICE. Instanced geometry was used to create animated charaters that behave in unique ways and avoid obstacles.

Fire, Smoke, Liquids. Make it happen with ICE.

ICE particle shaders include new volume and density shaders for creating fire, smoke and much more. A new blob shader, useful for liquid particle effects generates real geometry that you can texture.

Click to enlarge

ICE makes it easy to create and direct complex fire effects.

Predictable, interactive results using ICE

ICE particle simulations are fully directable . You can deform particle systems using standard XSI deformers, and direct them along curves. While traditional particle systems force need you to compute the simulation before you can play it back, ICE gives you fast, interactive results at run-time that you can edit on the fly.

Re-use particle simulations easily

ICE comes with an efficient particle caching system that makes it easy to import and export simulations. You can even bring particle caches into the animation mixer to create blended and looped particle effects.

Blazing Speed. Complete Control.

Because the particle system is based on ICE, and powered by the new GigaCore II engine, your simulations will be fully multi-threaded and run blazingly fast. And because all of the particle presets are packaged as ICE compounds, you can open them up and modify, customize, and extend them to suit your production needs.

CLOTH

XSI comes with Syflex cloth, an incredibly fast and stable simulation engine that lets you create a broad range of cloth and flesh effects directly within the XSI interface. Simple to learn and use, Syflex makes it easy to create digital cloth.

The Syflex volume force allows you to inflate an object like a balloon. Download video - right-click and save as...

The Syflex zipper force simulates... well... zippers. Download video - right-click and save as...

Syflex cloth lets you create a broad range of cloth and flesh effects directly in XSI.

BEHAVIOR CROWD SIMULATION

Available as part of XSI Advanced, Behavior is a powerful framework for choreographing tens, or even hundreds of thousands of XSI-created characters, and rendering them right in XSI.

Using Behavior, a TD can turn around a completed crowd simulation in a fraction of the time that traditional methods require. Behavior includes automatic terrain following, obstacle avoidance, rag-doll dynamics, stunt forces, automatic motion blending and curve following for flocking.

HAIR AND FUR

Create long, luxurious, and truly realistic hair and fur with dynamic effects—all rendered using mental ray. XSI hair offers a range of specialized tools for creating hair, including the innovative proportional grooming tool. You can use any native XSI deformers, including lattices and curves, for precise, natural hair styling with complete control over the animation. Full shape instancing means you can also use XSI hair to create anything from feathers to grass to trees, using the same intuitive toolset.

XSI's hair instancing and hair styling tools let create more tha just hair. Here, instanced grass and trees are "styled" to bring a field scene to life. Download video - right-click and save as...

Click to enlarge

UVPhactory used XSI hair to create this stylized river for Bjork's Wanderlust video.

RIGID BODIES

XSI comes with the Aegeia PhysX simulation engine, an ideal choice for complex rigid-body simulations. PhysX offers Convex Hull and Actual Shape collision types, as well as static and dynamic friction, and position offsets for spring and slider constraints. PhysX is well suited to simulations involving high numbers of rigid body objects with complex geometry. For debris-type simulations requiring very high numbers of small and simple objects, you can use a subset of the PhysX engine to define particle behaviors in ICE particle simulations.

Take a look at a couple of impressive rigid body dynamics simulations created with XSI and integrated Aegeia PhysX. Download video - right-click and save as...

Click to enlarge

The PhysX rigid body simulation system can handle high numbers of highly detailed objects.

Click to enlarge

For debris-type simulations with large amounts of small, simple objects, use PhysX to control the behavior of ICE particles.

SOFT BODIES

XSI has a deformation-based softbody simulation system that you can use for all of your squishy squashy soft body effects. You can apply soft body simulations to entire objects, or specific clusters, and control mass, friction, stiffness, and plasticity. You can even convert soft body simulations to shape animation.

Back to Tour