[Bf-committers] ICE

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Randall,

Heya, good to hear from you, missed you in LA Siggraph :)

I got good demos of ICE there, and it's indeed quite impressive. I 
liked the 'selection node' a lot, just drag selections into the node 
editor and operate on it. XSI did a good job on making it very 
transparently accessible. Something we should be able to tackle with 
Brecht's Data API ("RNA") project though. Exciting times ahead!

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute BV  Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam The Netherlands

On 31 Oct, 2008, at 18:01, Randall Rickert wrote:

> I just attended a Softimage seminar where they demonstrated ICE. Some
> of you will already be familiar with it, but if you haven't seen it
> yet, it's a graphical node-based extension system. Imagine the
> functionality of Blender's Python API being available through the
> node system now being used only for material/composite nodes, and
> you'll have a pretty good idea of what it is. It was conceived as a
> way to make a better particle system and grew to expose the whole
> API, so it can be used to create new tools, modifiers, effects, etc.
>
> Aside from giving access to the whole API, most of the features the
> lecturer was excited about are already part of Blender's node system,
> such as automatic type conversion where nodes are connected (such as
> vector to scalar or scalar to vector) and ability to group a
> collection of nodes so it can be treated as a single node and easily
> reused.
>
> http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/ice/default.aspx
>
> The two most interesting things I heard in the seminar (and why I
> thought it would be interesting to Blender developers):
>
> 1. It's already being used by a few game studios to prototype games.
> Sound familiar? The screenshot in the ICE page above even shows state
> machine nodes.
>
> 2. The Softimage rep claimed that ICE was the reason Autodesk decided
> to acquire Softimage.
>
> Cheers,
> Randall
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