Have you ever wondered what was used for the absolutely incredible fracturing effects in the Nissan Altima “Wouldn’t It Be Cool?” spot?. Ever since the release of the Nissan Altima “Wouldn’t It Be Cool?” many have asked what software or techniques were used in its creation… Well, Eric Mootz and emTopolizer! Eric Mootz has released the initial version for emTopolizer for Softimage ICE which is a plugin for creating and accessing geometry within Softimage ICE.

emTopolizer is a Softimage ICE plugin for creating, accessing and manipulating geometry within ICE

I am sure that most of you have seen the Nissan Altima “Wouldn’t It Be Cool?” commercial spot, and if you haven’t, I have included it below. Eric Mootz was involved with building several tools to create the meshing and polygons breaking into smaller components, and this is the result and basis of emTopolizer for Softimage.

Eric demonstrates an overview of his new emTopolizer tool for Softimage providing a walkthrough of its functionality and takes a closer look at some of the demo scenes, emTopolizer’s Vertex Islands, and Geometry Reader and Writer.

emTopolizer for Softimage ICE is available for Softimage 2012 SP1 and above for roughly $190.00, and the plugin consists of an Addon that contains a “DLL” file (Windows) or “so” file (Linux) for the custom ICE node (compiled C++ code for 64 bit versions of Softimage) and many ICE compounds.

emTopolizer 1.00 Tutorial 01 – Walk Through from Eric Mootz on Vimeo.

emTopolizer 1.00 Tutorial 02 – A closer look at the demo scenes from Eric Mootz on Vimeo.

emTopolizer 1.00 Tutorial 03 – Vertex Islands from Eric Mootz on Vimeo.

emTopolizer 1.00 Tutorial 04 – The Geometry Reader and Writer from Eric Mootz on Vimeo.

emTopolizer 1.00 Tutorial 05 – The Polygonizer Jungle from Eric Mootz on Vimeo.

emTopolizer features:

  • high speed geometry caching

    Reads and writes polygon meshes via a single ICE compound preset or via the “Geometry Reader/Writer” operators.

    Currently supported formats:

    • .mzd (native format, compatible with emPoylgonizer v.4).
    • .emp2 (native format, compatible with Softimage’s built-in Polygonizer and version 2, 3 and 4 of emPoylgonizer).
    • .obj (Wavefront’s ASCII format, compatible with all 3D packages).
    • .bin (RealFlow’s binary geometry format, compatible with Maya and 3ds Max).

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  • high performance polygonizer within ICE
    The brand new multithreaded meshing core with a new memory management (ridiculously small memory usage whatever you are meshing).
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  • UVW Engineer
    A highly versatile texture coordinate creation tool designed to create UVs for geometry sequences with changing topology, typically meshed liquid simulations coming either directly from polygonizer or from a cached geometry file sequence (e.g. RealFlow meshes).
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  • Vertex Islands / Polygon Islands
    Access to vertex/polygon island data in linear time. Combine this with the “Vertex Island” tool of the freeware addon emTools to animate and control vertex islands via an ordinary point cloud.
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  • Thickenizer
    Apply some thickness to a polygon mesh, no matter how heavy.
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  • Shatterizer
    Disconnect and extrude the polygons whilst preserving the UVs, normals and vertex colors.
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  • The “Geometry Free Reader”
    A free geometry reader compound, good when throwing some scenes onto the farm that use cached geometry.
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  • Many further little high speed goodies
    Fix non-manifold edges, quadrangule, apply a special liquid mesh smoothing, sort vertices and polygons, blur normals, blur UVs, blur colors, close holes in a mesh, etc.