A small ICE suggestion

[David Barosin]

It would be nice to have a right click context menu option to add a 'pass thru' node in front of the selected ICE node.

[jimmy gass]

agreed

also, if that node you are wanting to pass through is plugged into multiple nodes, it will account for all of them. When dragging in a pass through, and you have it used a few time, you have to manually connect them all...

[Bradley Gabe]

I wrote a self installing pluging that does exactly that. Lemme see if I can fish it up...

[Octavian Ureche]

ha, while we're at it, how about integrating / improving? andy' tab
menu in ice and the rendertree, and adding a straight line option for
viewing the links between nodes a 'la nuke/houdini. it would make xsi
life so much nicer.

[David Barosin]

Sweet Brad.  No worries if you can't find it.  Just seems like a reoccurring moment for many of us.  I was thinking it was a candidate for the next release.  

[Gene Crucean]

+1

I'd also like to see a tab + type kind of setup similar to nuke and houdini for the ice tree.

Instead of always having the full list of nodes visible and hogging space, it would be nice to have this contextual menu type of setup. It's super handy in nuke/houdini.

--
[Gene Crucean] - [VFX & CG Supervisor/Generalist]
** Freelance for hire **

[Fabricio Chamon]

may I add one?

right click on any set data input port > get this data
(or the inverse) right click on any get data node > set this data

this would replace the boring workflow of copying variable name > grab
get/set data node > paste variable name.

I'm considering doing it here as an addon, but it would be nice to
have an out of the box solution for this..

[Guillaume Laforge]

I was thinking exactly the same Fabricio ! Copy/pasting a set/get data string reference into a get/set data is done so many time.

Don't read between lines btw, nothing planed or not-planed for this tool at AD.

Cheers

Guillaume

[Sam Cuttriss]

yeah, i was thinking something like if you shift drag a "get" particle size node from the menu it automatically get the corresponding "set" node and attach it.

[Fabricio Chamon]

good to know it is a shared perspective Guillaume!
even though there's nothing planned, it could serve as a good starting
point for further discussions.

[jimmy gass]

this would replace the boring workflow of copying variable name > grab
get/set data node > paste variable name.

Maybe I'm not understanding correctly,

But can't you get this by just plugging the "out name" of the get data to the "in name" of the set data, and you only have to write the variable in the get data?

[Fabricio Chamon]

you can, but sometimes you'd prefer having separate nodes for better
graph readability.

[Octavian Ureche]

About readability, i don't know about you guys, but i think it would
help tremendously if the whole nodal system would be modified a little
bit, so that it would also allow for vertical style construction of
the trees. As it is right now, everything in xsi is built around the
left-to-right mindset (fusion style), but working with other tools, i
see a growing trend towards the vertical approach. I know that a
vertical workflow can be used right now, but it is forced, as the
incoming ports of the nodes, among other things, are all on the sides.
Maybe have the dots of the ports shift from sides to top-bottom
depending on where the connection is coming from, and in this case,
leave the text info from the ports out of the actual node, and only
triggered on a query basis, or a pop-up window (similar to a collapsed
state).

Just my 2 cents,
Octav

[Octavian Ureche]

Actually, on second thought, the whole idea with the switching of
ports positions seems a bit ridiculous.
If it were that simple to do a vertical/horizontal hybrid visual
system, some geniuses over there would have figured it out.

[Eric Turman]

I think that it is also a matter of the connections getting tangle up under nodes that they need to cross. A large ICE tree can look like a black widow spiderweb on crack. In Nuke you are able to drop a "dot" (I can't remember what it is called right now) so you can force the visual path of your connections around in an organized manner by connecting to and from that "dot" node.

-=Eric

--




-=T=-

[Juhani Karlsson]

I think it is called "elbow node" in Fusion, very handy. Dunno about nuke.

2011/6/14 Eric Turman <i.ani...@gmail.com>

[Eric Turman]

Yes, whatever it is called, it *is very handy on keeping things tidy

--




-=T=-

[Octavian Ureche]

It is indeed called a dot. handy little bugger.
Unfortunately any kind of similar node "routers" would be pretty
useless in an ice context.
In nuke or any comp package for that matter, there's only a single
type of data flowing along, while in ice u have all kinds of things,
so taking all that and trying to route it through a proxy port would
make the mess even messier.
Intially i thought of the houdini context, but even there, at the top
level, it acts like a comping package does, piping the same "type" of
data between nodes, thus it is quite easy to hook stuff up in any
visual fashion. Once you get at the "vop" level, things look just like
ice, even worse from a visual perspective :)

[Thomas Volkmann]

+1
And while we're at it:
Navigating with middle-mousebutton would be cool, and maybe something like a grease-pencil to label parts of the tree. Now there is the group comment, but to read what it says you always have to zoom in...

[Grahame Fuller]

Well, you can drop a Pass Through node onto a connection and then move it wherever you want. They do take up more real estate than a dot, though, and you also loose info about the connection in the popup that appears when you over over the connections while zoomed out.

gray

[Ciaran Moloney]

I don't know...I find Nuke up/down layout a little harder to read the whole flow of things at once (maybe I'm using it wrong!). I guess you can often view more of the ICE graph at once because of the aspect ratio of our monitors, which keep getting wider.

[Ciaran Moloney]

Has anyone ever looked inside the main emFluid 3 compound? Some interesting graffiti in there.

[tak...@earthlink.net]

I have to admit I was slightly disappointed to see that there wasn't data actually flowing through it...

-T

-----Original Message-----
From: Ciaran Moloney
Sent: Jun 14, 2011 1:56 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A small ICE suggestion

[Stefan Kubicek]

In front of which Port of the selected ICE node? All of it's ports, or always just the first one?

If I get this right you want a workflow like this:

1. In a compound select one or more nodes which have ports you want to pass through
2. Envoke RC-Menu, click "Pass through" and a Pass through node is created for every selected nodes first port (or all of its ports)
and resulting Pass Through node's input ports will be connected to the list of exposed input ports of the current compound node that is being edited.

Is this what you had in mind?

> It would be nice to have a right click context menu option to add a 'pass
> thru' node in front of the selected ICE node.
>

--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek Co-founder
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Wehrgasse 9 - Grï¿œner Hof
1050 Vienna Austria
Phone: +43/699/12614231
--- www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at ---
-- This email and its attachments are
--confidential and for the recipient only--

[Ciaran Moloney]

There's a context menu for ICE node ports. You could just click on the port that should connect to the passthrough.

[David Barosin]

Stefan you bring up a good point.  The motivation was to make it easy to swap nodes that connect to many places.  So handling all output port would probably be the coarse solution.  I could see arguments for both options that you mention though.
 

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Stefan Kubicek <s...@tidbit-images.com> wrote:

In front of which Port of the selected ICE node? All of it's ports, or always just the first one?

If I get this right you want a workflow like this:

1. In a compound select one or more nodes which have ports you want to pass through
2. Envoke RC-Menu, click "Pass through" and a Pass through node is created for every selected nodes first port (or all of its ports)
       and resulting Pass Through node's input ports will be connected to the list of exposed input ports of the current compound node that is being edited.

Is this what you had in mind?

It would be nice to have a right click context menu option to add a 'pass
thru' node in front of the selected ICE node.

--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek                   Co-founder
-------------------------------------------
         keyvis digital imagery

        Wehrgasse 9 - Grüner Hof

[David Barosin]

Does that work for output ports too?

[Ciaran Moloney]

I haven't worked with that stuff for a while, but I'm pretty sure it does.

[Jean-Philippe Delisle]

Personally, I think that if you want a better readability, we should have a way to build struct and inspect those struct with a get data. I was kind of disappointed when I try to plug a Topology node in the source of a get data and it didn’t want. Topology was a dataType that I was expecting in the form of a struct.

 

JP

 

From: Ciaran Moloney

Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:46 PM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: A small ICE suggestion

 

[Stefan Kubicek]

@Ciaran: Right,thx, I just found that one too. Is this one of the newly exposed Menu Anchor points in 2012 SP1 (as of FELX-562) ?
I think it shouldn't be too hard to add a menu entry there to connect the corresponding port with a Pass Through node and have that connected to the compound input port list.
Straight forward and 100% deterministic.

Speaking of 2012SP1, and FELX-562 in particular, I can see that a lot of Menu anchor points have been added (thanks to whoever at ADSK took a heart and finally exposed those, I think I
wished for many of those at least a dozen times), but I wonder what View Attributes were actually added that the change description mentions. Are they listed somewhere?
I briefly looked over the View Attributes Documentation (http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2012/en_us/sdkguide/si_cmds/ViewAttributes.html#) but couldn't find any that appeared to be new,
I must have missed soimething, or some other attributes are meant and I'm on the wrong page.

@David: Question about doing this with multiple selected nodes remains: Which of the ports should be connected? Quite surely not all of them in 99.9% of all cases, or is this rather common?
Many times it would not be the first one either, or am I wrong? As a workaround maybe one could select the nodes and display the Property Editor, then mark the parameters that should be connected with a pass through node,
then call the command to create the pass through nodes and do all the wiring, but strangely the PPG for multiple selected ICE nodes only pops up when the selected nodes are not inside a compound. A bug? Or intention?
Ideas? Suggestions?

[David Barosin]

Selecting multiple nodes goes beyond what I was imagining.  More the idea of what Ciaran is suggesting.  Just inserting a pass thru after a specific output port that would maintain connections with any downstream nodes.

If a node had many outputs then you could right click on a specific port to add the pass thru.  All this hinging on the ability to have a context menu for output ports. 

        Wehrgasse 9 - Grüner Hof

[Stephen Blair]

There's a selectedlayer attribute for the scene layer manager and a Target for the schematic.
http://wp.me/powV4-YP

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Stefan Kubicek
Sent: June-14-11 6:15 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A small ICE suggestion

Wehrgasse 9 - Grüner Hof

[Juhani Karlsson]

I have aways wished that compositing softwares would have layered node&flowview. : D
It would be so nice to be able to move in layers of depth also..

- Juhani

2011/6/15 Stephen Blair <Stephe...@autodesk.com>

[Stefan Kubicek]

Thank you Steven!

Wehrgasse 9 - Grï¿œner Hof

[Stefan Kubicek]

Sorry, that's Stephen with "ph" of course.

[Ciaran Moloney]

I had a little go at this myself: http://blog.blackredking.org/?p=201.

There's no context menu for output ports as such, so just right-click on the outgoing wire (which is really the connected input port). Also, there's a context menu to remove pass through nodes.
Of course, there's no way to control where in the ICE universe the created pass through node will land.....

Ciaran

[Fabricio Chamon]

nice one Ciaran! super useful

"there's no way to control where in the ICE universe the created pass
through node will land...."

major PITA

[David Barosin]

Ciaran!  Very cool.  Thanks for putting the time and brain cycles in on this.  Inspiring.  

[Andy Moorer]

What a time saver. Awesome, Ciaran.

[tak...@earthlink.net]

Nice one, Ciaran! Very cool.

-T

-----Original Message-----
>From: Ciaran Moloney <moloney...@gmail.com>
>Sent: Jul 4, 2011 6:55 PM
>To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
>Subject: Re: A small ICE suggestion
>

[Ciaran Moloney]

Hey, no problem! Scripting ICE trees is always an adventure....

btw here:'s an updated version with some bugs squished: CM_ICEPortPassthrough-1.02.xsiaddon

[Thomas Le Calvé]

Thanks !

Now AD, please, we need a way to control a node's position, like the FX tree api can ! (I'm an aesthete ;) )

Thomas Le Calvé

2011/7/5 Ciaran Moloney <moloney...@gmail.com>

[Fabricio Chamon]

sorry for the thread hijacking Ciaran, but while we are on the
subject, here's some ice workflow utilities I've just finished coding.
As we already started brainstorming in this thread, I find it a good
place to post:

ICE Workflow Utilities
http://vimeo.com/26015535
download addon: dl.dropbox.com/​u/​17263464/​Addons/​ICE_WorkflowUtils.xsiaddon

*requires a softimage restart after installation. (or after any change
in the submenu mode (combobox) on the user preferences.)

of course this random node placements are going to be a showstopper
eventually; (on big icetrees)

[Gene Crucean]

Nice! I'm liking where this thread is going :)

Thanks Ciaran and Fabricio

--
Gene Crucean - VFX & CG Supervisor / Generalist
** Freelance for hire **

~~ This email address is ONLY my email for lists. If you want to send a personal email to me and do not know my main email address, please use my website's contact form. www.genecrucean.com. Thanks. ~~

[Mathieu Leclaire]

Oh yeah!! ...these are all so useful !!

Now if only someone can figure out a way to write a plug-in that can
quickly move exposed ports inside a compound up and down instead of
having to rely on a right-click move up, right-click move up,
right-click move up... that one still drives me crazy.

Thanks for sharing guys.

-Mathieu

[Fabricio Chamon]

"Now if only someone can figure out a way to write a plug-in that can
quickly move exposed ports inside a compound up and down instead of
having to rely on a right-click move up, right-click move up,
right-click move up... that one still drives me crazy."

please DO ! +1000000000000000

[Sebastian Kowalski]

this is unbelievable practical! thanks a lot Fabricio

[Ciaran Moloney]

Excellent idea! I'll be using this one for sure.