Softimage offers a major upgrade to its XSI software. All images © Softimage.

A new version of Softimage|XSI has arrived and from the looks of this release; the crew working on it appear to have been very, very busy. Updates and new features have been added to just about every major aspect of the software. However the one that seems to stand out the most is called ICE. What is ICE? It's an "Interactive Creative Environment" that can be used to create effects and tools. If you are familiar with XSI, then you've most likely used the render tree. (A node based material creation tool.) Formerly named Moondust, ICE is similar in that it is also a node based tool that allows you to build an effect from scratch, using very basic nodes (for atomic-level control) or higher level (pre-built) nodes to create something relatively complex in a much shorter time. Sounds great, but what does it do?

The interface of the ICE tree is very similar to XSI's rendertree.

It allows you to use nodes to create interactive tools via a visual programming interface called the ICE Tree. Networks of these nodes can get data from the scene, modify and process it to create tools which can then be used to generate all sorts of effects and changes to the scene. Technically ICE can only be used to create particle effects and deformations, but that's an oversimplification. Since pretty much any point data can be manipulated with ICE it can create a lot more effects that most people would not think to put in those two categories. Additionally, there is a hidden feature that allows ICE to write to kinematics. (At the moment you can only read them.) You've got to adjust an environment variable to get to it, thus opening yourself up to the possible instabilities caused by an unsupported feature. But just knowing that Softimage is working to expand ICE into other areas of the program is very exciting. While ICE comes with hundreds of operators, it also comes with more than 200 presets that anyone can drop into the scene so they can start working immediately. These presets are actually compounds (more on that later) and can be "opened up" and modified to create totally different effects. Opening up a compound is also a good way for users new to ICE to learn how everything works.