CHARKINS I’m running this monkey farm now, Frankenstein!

Pinart Compound for Softimage ICE

I recently completed some experiments for an ICE compound I created to simulate the pin art effect. That toy you had as a kid - the one with a bazillion little pins that conform to your face when you smoosh your head into them. Ah, good times... Here is what I came up with:

This was a great learning exercise for me and I think I've produced something that (I hope) others will use or modify to fit their needs.

Here are the features:

- It creates points based on the number of vertices of the 'plate' object - no more, no less. It assigns a generic point shape or instance of your choice and orients the point based on the object's normal direction. Generic set point data provided.

- Using the 'plate' object's Texture_Map, points are translated along their normal direction. You can pipe in any image or sequence and it will use the values to drive the animation.

- A gradient, driven by point offset/image value, is setting the point color. You can use this to drive various shader attributes as the point reaches its highest altitude. In the examples above, I drive luminosity, reflectivity, color.

- I found that some image sequences cause point jittering (image compression) on areas with little or no perceived value change, so I added a jitter suppression switch that averages current and previous frame point locations - smoothing out the motion considerably. I had great success with .sgi format to avoid any artifacts.

DOWNLOAD it here! (right-click, save as)

Here is a snapshot of the compound basics - click for larger:

I would love to see if and how this is applied to any of your work.
Questions or comments, please shoot me some email at chris.l.harkins [at] gmail dot com.