If you liked the original Syflex Cloth plug-in for Softimage, you're going to love Syflex ICE!
Syflex ICE is the ICE version of the Syflex Cloth plug-in that is installed with Softimage - see Syflex Cloth in Softimage. Syflex ICE includes a complete set of deformation simulators, force, collision, and constraint compounds and nodes that allow you to set up complete cloth and curve deformation simulations.
Once you have a Syflex ICE tree set up for your simulated object, you can add most "regular" ICE nodes as you would normally in an ICE tree. This allows you to use the power of ICE to modify your cloth or curve simulation in ways that aren't possible with the Syflex Cloth plug-in.
Cloth or Curve Simulations: You can create either cloth or curve deformations using the Syflex ICE nodes and compounds. The Syflex ICE Cloth and Curve operators use a spring-based model for simulating deformations. See Creating Syflex ICE Simulations.
Forces: After you set up how the cloth or curve is deformed according to its own "internal" spring-based forces, you can then affect how it's deformed using standard external forces like gravity and wind. You can use other spring-based effects to create zippers, or a volume-pressure force to create soft-body effects. See Syflex ICE Forces.
Collisions: You can have the simulated cloth or curve collide with other objects (or cloth with itself). The obstacles can be animated or deformed and interact with the cloth or curve according to physical properties such as friction and elasticity. You can use actual-shape polygon mesh collision objects, or create simple bounding-shape collision objects. See Syflex ICE Collisions.
Constraints: In many simulations, you need to pin or nail a cloth or curve to some other object. With Syflex ICE, you can define which points on a cloth or curve are to be constrained using either clusters or nulls. You can also constrain the cloth or curve points to another object so that the cloth or curve mimics that object's movements. See Syflex ICE Constraints.
Getting Started with Syflex ICE
To help you get started with learning about Syflex ICE simulations, there are a number of resources:
Load and play with the sample scenes that are installed with Softimage in the Softimage install path/Data/XSI_Samples/Scenes/ICE folder. All Syflex scenes start with the prefix "Syflex".
See Overview of the Syflex Workflow and Anatomy of a Syflex ICE Tree to help you understand the basic Syflex ICE workflow and ICE tree.
Before you start simulating anything for real, see Creating the Cloth or Curve Geometry for information on modelling the geometry to get the best results.
You can find all Syflex ICE nodes and compounds in the preset manager in the ICE Tree view: check the Task tab > Syflex for compounds (see Task Tab - Syflex) and the Tool tab > Syflex for nodes (see ICE Nodes - all Syflex nodes start with the prefix "syflex").
The Syflex ICE compounds and nodes are tuned so that 1 Softimage unit is equal to 10 cm, but you can use a different scale as you like. You can get a rough idea of which parameter values to use with the JavaScript form in the Syflex Cloth plug-in reference documentation that is installed with Softimage in the Softimage install path/Docs/Syflex folder - open the syflex_units.html file.
Differences between the Syflex Cloth Plug-in and Syflex ICE
Besides the obvious difference of Syflex ICE being a set of ICE nodes, here are some other differences you may notice if you're familiar with the Syflex Cloth plug-in:
Although the simulation is very similar, there might be some slightly different ways in which a Syflex ICE simulation is solved, such as cloth folding in a different place.
Syflex ICE simulation is a bit faster with some complex meshes that have faces of different sizes.
In the Syflex Cloth plug-in, there is a Stiffness and Damping parameter for each type of spring: Stretch, Shear, and Bend.
However, in Syflex ICE, there is only one Stiffness parameter and one Damping parameter, so the springs properties are defined as:
In the Syflex Cloth plug-in, damping depends on the resolution of the polygon mesh. In Syflex ICE, there is not this dependency, which makes damping easier to manage.
The Syflex ICE Zipper force is easier to use because you need to define only 3 points to join cloth edges together.
Syflex ICE allows you to use nulls to define constrained points, in addition to the regular way of using clusters on the simulated objects.
Syflex ICE has a compound that creates capsule-shaped collision objects.
With Syflex ICE, there's no preset way to select only certain polygons or vertices to be used for a collision.
There are no Skin or Flesh simulators in Syflex ICE yet - hey, you can't have everything in the first shot!
