ICE Interoperability for Maya

ICE interoperability for Maya lets you send ICE effects data back and forth between Maya and Softimage. This lets you take advantage of the ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) node-based dataflow structure to create a vast range of effects for your Maya scenes, including point cloud fire and simulated geometry deformations.

For information about exchanging data between Maya and other Autodesk applications, see Send objects to Autodesk applications. For information about ICE simulations, see the Softimage Wiki:http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Interoperability_with_Maya.

Sending scene objects

Scene data can be exchanged between the applications regardless of whether it originates in Maya or Softimage. Objects, including polygon meshes, curves, cameras, and lights, can be created in either Maya or Softimage and exchanged between the applications.

For example, you can select the following things in Maya to send to Softimage:

Any objects that you want to use to control particle effects in ICE. For example, this includes geometry for surface emitters as well as any collision objects, goal objects, and curves for particles to flow along.
Any geometry that you want to deform using ICE, plus any objects that you want to use to control the deformation.

When you send data back from Softimage to Maya, the following are sent:

An nCache for every ICE particle effect. In Maya, an nParticle object is created and set to read from the nCache. The name of the nParticle object is derived from the ICE effect.
A shading network consisting of materials and a ParticleSamplerInfo node is also created. This shading network lets you render your ICE effect in Maya as a Cloud or Blobby Surface Particle Render Type.

NoteWhen a scene is sent, a particle emitter node is not created in Maya, meaning that all particle emission-related settings and updates must be made in Softimage.

A geometry cache for every object sent from Maya that gets deformed by an ICE tree. In Maya, the geometry cache is applied automatically.

See Prepare your Maya scene for Softimage.

Supported nParticle attributes

The following tables list the nParticle attributes that can be included in the nCache from Softimage, and the ICE attributes that they correspond to.

Required attributes

Maya	Softimage
position	PointPosition
id	ID
rgbpp	Color (RGB channels)
opacityPP	Color (Alpha channel)
radiusPP	Size
mass	Mass
count	NbPoints

Optional attributes

Maya	Softimage
velocity	PointVelocity
birthTime (calculated as CurrentTime - Age in Softimage)	Age
lifespanPP	AgeLimit
rotationPP	Orientation
angularVelocityPP	AngularVelocity

You can choose which optional attributes you want included in the effect cache. To do this, in Softimage, select File > Send to Maya > Preferences. For more information, see the Softimage Wiki:http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Interoperability_with_Maya