I've been looking at the ICE SDK as a start to the process of writing custom ICE Nodes in C++. I need to write topology generators, modifiers and deformation nodes. So far all the source code I've seen supplied with Softimage only deal with particle clouds or primitive data such as converting integers to scalars. Does anybody have source code for working with the Softimage SDK inside an ICE Node to modify topology/geometry?.....or Kinematics? Example: creating a polygon mesh from scratch, adding/removing subcomponents, dealing with clusters, etc... I ask this partly because the ICE SDK docs say to not use the object model....which leads to the question - how do I do anything?
While also browsing the SDK docs, I saw in the 'limitations' section that custom ICE Nodes cannot define reference, location, or execute ports. Since I am very interested in working with locations, does this mean I cannot do queries for locations from inside the ICE Node? Or does it only mean I cannot send/receive locations from other ICE nodes? Example: I need to write an ICE Node which takes a polygon mesh and 2 NURBS Surfaces as inputs, and whose output is the deformation of a 2nd polygon mesh. To accomplish this feat requires the use of point Locators to map the relationship between the first polygon mesh's points relative to the first surface, then re-interpret that information to deform the points of the 2nd polygon mesh in relation to the 2nd surface. You can assume the two polygon meshes and two surfaces have identical topology. I need to write this as a custom ICE node because it is prohibitively expensive to use the factory nodes (too many nodes/workarounds required leading to severe performance degradation). I'd like to be able to do a point locator query from inside the custom ICE node for performance (and convenience) reasons. Sample code would be a big help. Anybody? Matt
