ICE Port Explorer

[Ciaran Moloney]

Hi,
I was a bit bored of typing Self.blahblahblah 100 times a day. So, here's another tool to help speed up ICE workflow. With this you can quickly place attributes on Set or Get Data ports through context menus, or browse for any ICE attribute and place it there. Maybe it'll speed things up, maybe not..

http://blog.blackredking.org/?p=224

[Eric Thivierge]

Very awesome! Thanks!

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Currently: Digital Artist, Rigging at Animal Logic
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Amaan Akram]

what a nice way to boost workflow. Thanks Ciaran

[Kiril Aronofski]

Awesome stuff, Cairan. Thanks for sharing.

Can i suggest a little change? ICE attributes and Kine cannot be set as top menus currently. If you added that, we could completely eliminate one extra menu by setting everything at the top level.

Shorter the path - less trouble digging.

[Alan Fregtman]

Hey Ciaran, nice plugin! It will save me time.

Don't forget about "this_parent". ;)

Cheers,

-- Alan

[David Barosin]

Great stuff Ciaran!  btw still diggin' the passThru plugin.

[Fabricio Chamon]

absolutely must have!

downloading... 

thanks Ciaran

[Andy Moorer]

Echo previous comments... I'm already hooked on using it, and rapidly put it into my "kit bag" of stuff I take with me everywhere.

[Juhani Karlsson]

Thanks a lot Ciaran! : )

I wish something like this would be default in SI.

2011/10/16 Andy Moorer <andym...@gmail.com>

[Kiril Aronofski]

>I wish something like this would be default in SI.

I wish something like a tab key popup search would be default in SI. Maybe even so advanced you could type "set data.PointP" and it auto-completes that for you, gets the node out and populates the value... A man can dream.

Sorry for the OT! : )

[andreas felix gebhardt]

Very helpful. Thanks Ciaran!

-F(a)

[tak...@earthlink.net]

Great stuff Ciaran!  Already finding it very convenient and easy to get used to. 
Great idea also to specify your own frequently used attributes too and set the port types manually.

Cheers!

-T

[Sebastian Kowalski]

thanks ciaran, thats a great tool.

[Sam Cuttriss]

So good to see usability refinements motivated directly from production frustrations.  

Im absolutely loving your ice tools.

the sooner they get rolled into the app the better.

actually the sooner this mode of thinking gets rolled into the app the better.

many thanks

[Mathieu Leclaire]

I'm loving this tool!

If I may add a suggestion: I often extract attributes from locations...
It would be great to add an extra menu for locations that would set the
attribute without the "this." or "self." in front.

I think I'm just gonna edit your script and add that functionality
myself, because now that I'm using this tool, there's simply no going
back to the old way of doing it anymore.

Thanks for sharing.
-Mathieu

[Ciaran Moloney]

Thanks all for the replies!

I'll try to add some of the suggestions from you guys (I didn't even know about 'self_parent'. Thanks, Alan!)

Regarding locations, originally I had hoped to support full exploring of attributes available from a location (if the get data node was connected to a location). Unfortunately, there is no way in the SDK (that I could find) to resolve the source geometry of an ICE location data. So, one cannot be sure which ICE attributes are available in order to correctly populate the menus. In fact Softimage told me to get lost when trying to querying a location attribute. With regular name references it's easy, but locations look like a dead end, unless you just wanted a basic selection of universal attributes?

Perhaps a feature to turn off automatic name completion and just insert an attribute unadorned - maybe a keyboard modifier?

Ciaran