Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

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alias3ds
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Joined: 11 Apr 2015, 03:03

Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by alias3ds » 10 Jul 2016, 14:53

Hi There

I'm on the process of learning Softimage ICE. But it really confused me because of lacking of related tutorials (videos ,book, etc) . Is there anyone could offer me some recommendations or share some of your experiences?

Any help is welcome. Thank you.

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Alias

Pooby
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 22:25

Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by Pooby » 11 Jul 2016, 00:05

https://vimeopro.com/pooby/ice

heres a bunch of stuff I did


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alias3ds
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Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by alias3ds » 18 Jul 2016, 05:51

Thank you very much for your kind help :) !

Regards
Alias

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alias3ds
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Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by alias3ds » 18 Jul 2016, 05:58

Pooby wrote:https://vimeopro.com/pooby/ice

heres a bunch of stuff I did
Thank you very much :D . It's quite useful!

Regards
Alias


jonmoore
Posts: 153
Joined: 30 Jul 2016, 18:18

Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by jonmoore » 07 Aug 2016, 00:58

I'm a long of tooth artist that came to the delights of XSI just before it's official last breadth of EOL support. Much as I'm not much of a fan of Digital Tutors, their old Softimage and ICE content particular is pretty decent. The rendering ICE volumes episode is essential and the Ice node reference stuff is very handy too (if a tad dull consumed all at once, but who reads the dictionary A-Z).

Obviously Paul Smith's Vimeo stiff has been great. The thing I like most about watching Paul's stuff from the beginning is that he's happy to record his mistakes too so it's mirrored my own learning journey in a strange time-warped fashion.

CMIVFX (RIP Mr Maynard) has always been another hit and miss resource but much like the Houdini content, the Softimage stuff is great and the ICE stuff within it is probably the best especially as a couple of the tutorials come from Thiago Costa. Best of all the XSI CMIVFX stuff is $10 a pop and when I was buying them they were a further 60% off, so I bought the lot!

The final thing that really helped me become accustomed to XSI (as a whole not just ICE) was the excellent PDF documentation and tutorials that date back to XSI's Avid days. The quality of this material reminded me just how lazy our industry has become in the last 10 years or so. Back then if you were spending considerable coin on software you were at least provided decent documentation to help you get the most out of your purchase without the need of shelling out yet more coin on 'professional training' (what's the emoticon for exaggerated inverted commas!). You can grab these here:

http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/ind ... umentation

Even though I'm exceptionally late to the party, I'm not budging. Through the help of http://www.rray.de/xsi/ any features I found lacking in XSI seemed to have a community designed alternative, which in many cases surpass the tools in Maya/Max/Modo that inspired them.

Hopefully now I've made my inaugural post, it won't take me months of wallflower lurking before my next. :)
Last edited by jonmoore on 07 Aug 2016, 13:59, edited 1 time in total.

Pooby
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Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by Pooby » 07 Aug 2016, 11:15

My opinion is that ICE will become obsolete the day Polygons, Vectors and Matrices are no longer needed. If ICE didn't exist, I'd be delighted if I could afford to build such a thing just for me as a proprietory tool. I would feel it gave me a unique advantage.

Everyone has their own reasons for moving, or not moving on, and I'm still keeping one eye on Fabric and the other on Houdini, but for me at the moment and foreseeable future, Softimage is going to remain at the heart of my work because my primary interest is in the efficiency of making the projects I'm involved in; not getting a job in CGI.

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rray
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Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by rray » 07 Aug 2016, 18:03

welcome jonmoore - nice to see new comers :-bd I think there's quite a small crowd not attracted too much to the "retirement" options, so you'll have those around for quite a while.
softimage resources section updated Jan 5th 2024

jonmoore
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Joined: 30 Jul 2016, 18:18

Re: Any suggested tutorials for Softimage ICE

Post by jonmoore » 07 Aug 2016, 20:43

Thanks for the welcome Paul & RRay.

I'm one of the alpha/beta testers over in the Modo community which numbers a fair few XSI alumni amongst the small gang of regular contributors. Tim Crowson has been especially encouraging/helpful, so I've been fortunate to have had an informed helping hand along the way.

The strange but beautiful thing about my journey into the delights of XSI is that it started out as something to please my inner contrarian self and I half expected my interest to wane after the novelty had worn off. Quite the opposite has happened and rather than lamenting missing features in XSI, I'm constantly amazed at just how ahead of the game it was and still is.

XSI came up in conversation the other day on the Modo beta forum when I posted a test I'd done that day using Oleg Bliznuk's addon that GPU enables fluid sims and such like. This brought about lots of warm reminiscing ref XSI and I posted a comment I had remembered reading from Paul Smith on the Modo public forums in 2013:
I absolutely would invite people to learn Softimage even if it were discontinued, for the simple fact that, until some stunning new technology comes along. I believe it to be the most comprehensive and elegant way of making animated 3D and will remain so until another app comes along to compete with that.

If I found a better alternative to Softimage, I'd be off like a shot, as that would have to be totally amazing, but I'm not going to stop using it just because other apps that I see glaring deficiencies in, are being developed more. They need it more.

In my view, no other 3d app has the underlying workflow design or capability for the user to solve practically any problem without plugins, that Softimage has, not even close.

Having software stop being developed is only 'Armageddon' when other software becomes more appealing to use than the one in question. In which case, great. Winners all round and I can't wait for that day, but to me it feels a long way off and I firmly feel like I'm using something that's far ahead of the pack. However.

If I were making stills only, i could make do with different software if necessary. I wouldn't suggest a stills maker gets into Softimage. It's way overkill and I feel that modelling is something that other packages will see advances in that will surpass softimage first.
The funny thing is, I feel exactly the same way about XSI now. I am of course a little annoyed that I came to recognise it's genius only once it was officially the Dodo of the DCC world. But in a strange way it's been an exciting journey having been able to trawl through rray.de/xsi/ in reverse and benefit from all the community created addons without having had to endure the frustrations that led to there creations in the first place. :)

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