About ICE Kinematics

 
 
 

ICE kinematics allows advanced riggers and TDs to create custom rigs using a minimal number of control objects. A rig can be composed of simply the manipulators and the deformers. There is no need for complex hierarchies of helper objects — instead, an ICE tree can implement complex behaviors for the deformers' transformations based directly on the manipulators's transformations. This can greatly simplify and speed up very elaborate rigs. It also allows for more portability and reusability.

Using ICE in this way can become very complex, especially if you are not familiar with the mathematics underlying transformations and kinematics. Typical animators are unlikely to create their own rigs in ICE — instead, they'd use any of a variety of rigs built by expert riggers for specific purposes.

The Rules of ICE Kinematics

The main thing that makes ICE kinematics different from using ICE to control particle simulations or geometry deformations is that it involves setting the transformations of objects. Almost everything else, including connections, context, data types, and so on, is exactly the same as in the rest of ICE.

However, there are some specific rules when setting objects' transformations:

ICE Kinematics Sample Content

For some examples of scenes that use ICE kinematics, look at the Kinematics_* scenes in the ICE subfolder of the Scenes folder of the XSI_SAMPLES project. For some compounds that you can use when building your own scenes, use the plug-in manager to connect to the ICE_Kinematics workgroup located in the Application/Workgroups folder of the Softimage installation location (see Connecting to a Workgroup [Customization]). After you have connected to the workgroup, the compounds can be found under ICE Kinematics on the Tasks tab of the preset manager.