One thing you kind of see / feel already is that you can start mixing
things you normally couldn't in ICE. An example is to read in an
alembic and have it as an input into a rig. An example is to load an
alembic of your ground and have your leg solvers collide with it. Of
note would be that you wouldn't actually have the alembic in your scene
with the overhead that Softimage would carry with actual geo in the
scene for point and poly editing. You could still draw the ground using
the Inline drawing and eventually RTR but from what I've seen it
doesn't impact performance hard when you do.
You could also write out image sequences of where your character is
walking or where meshes are colliding too since they have image
libraries available. The work just needs to be done to map those areas
to UV space. But it's possible. So many areas are within reach from
what seems day one where with ICE we waited so long for so many
features we never got. No standard tools for writing out images from
ICE. :(
Another major thing for me is that you can convert your code into nodes
using the provided utility. You code up some methods using KL (at the
level of javascript & Python in syntax complexity) and you get the
nodes almost for free.
One thing I'm looking forward to and that I've already experienced in
our current production, is how easy it is to re-use code throughout
different systems. I can't go into too much detail but imagine writing
a solver that works for rigs in all your DCC's and can work in
specialized tools such as crowd tools too with little extra work. :)
It's awesome to see things working the same across DCC's and tools.
Eric T.
