This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.
It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the application. Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care. In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of the system. It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that never arrived? Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code. If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible! -Bradley Sent from my iPhone > On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all >> use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset? > > Nope
