Hi,

I'm having a bit of a problem creating randomly offset animation on ICE instances. That is, I've managed to get what I want but not by how the manual describes it (in the section 'Controlling the Instance's Animation'). I've followed that but it doesn't work:

This is what the manual describes I should do (sort of, I wanted instances exactly at and aligned with the verts of my driving geometry and I added some random size) . But this way, I can only control the in-and outpoint of all instances at the same time. They're still all moving in sync with the master object. Actually, the manual is unclear about what it describes. At the start of the chapter, it talks about offsetting walkcycles, but after that this doesn't come back.

So, after lots of tryouts, I did this:

I took out the control node, plugged in a 'randomize value by range' into the 'set instance geometry'-node's input frame value port, added the 'current frame' node and those combined with 'add' gives each instance it's own frame offset. ('Loop Value' is just an extra to never run out of animation)

Ofcourse, it's okay now that I've figured this out but still - for clarity's sake (I'm trying to understand ICE) and perhaps for future/more complex setups: why doesn't the way it's explained in the manual work? Am I doing something wrong there?

thanks, Jasper

Hmmmm....I think you have us stumped (me anyway). Did you try posting on the SI mailing list? There are a lot of serious ice experts there regularly. I'm sure they'd have an answer.

Ow, you make it sound as if I'm a serious ice expert. I can assure you, I'm not.

But the SI mailing list... would you say that's a better place to get an answer than here? That would kind of make me sad, actually. I really vastly prefer forums such as this one to mailing lists. I find them clumsy to browse, you can't upload files or display them inline, in fact I'd say forums were invented to replace mailing lists. I don't understand why they still exist. And I try to avoid them.

I'll take a look though, see if maybe this issue is mentioned there before... sigh...

(Oh, by the way, this is not to say I don't appreciate your advice, ActionArt)

Now, don't go running off to the Mailing List just yet...
Let me first take one well-intentioned (but not necessarily well-thought of) shot at this, and this is just a hunch: isn't this something to do with the problem of hierarchy when defining the "Animated Master Object", as described on this page?

Hi Hirazi,

no... if you want me to stay here you have to do better than that...

That's one of the pages I took my information from and that didn't do what it says (actually, it's what I initially did before diving in deeper and finding that other page with the somewhat different icetree). In that setup (with or without parenting the object in a hierarchy and using the Object + Children switch), I got either all instances at a random frame but no animation or animation but all instances at the same frame. In the end I just theorized that this random frame thing without animation could be fixed by adding the 'current frame' node and that works. But it still seems illogical that the compound by itself doesn't already do that (as the manual indeed states it does). So I assume I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

Yeah, I was afraid of that, sorry

If you got it to work, still with reasonable performance, you got it to work.
IMHO, for 'understand' ICE, best way is what you already did. Next step is to take look into compounds an try to build your own, something simple for first step. No one tutorial/manual can cover every possible combination of a few hundreds of nodes. These are just examples, introductions...
In first tree, there is nothing for randomizing the time, just size is randomized. Are you sure that 'control instance animation' is able to randomize the time ? If so, that's something new.

BTW, SI guys are frequent posters on this forum too.

Okay, now I have actually looked at it (and probably still will have come up with the wrong answer), but setting up an ICE Tree similar to your first image in this thread (the way of the manual) still leaves open the possibility to add a randomized value to the "Input Frame Value". So now I am officially confused. "My" setup used an "Emit from Surface" to create my particles (and a "Set Instance..." on every emit, not directly plugged in the ICE Tree), so it may be that you have to add additional info (setting some extra attributes) "on creation" of your "add point" activities (as an "Emit..." node sets a lot of attributes in and of itself)... But that again is merely guesswork...

well, 'plain' 'Random Value' node still requires some ID in order to make difference, 'Self.ID' is some usual input. 'Big' nodes for randomizing already have this.

Hirazi,

looking at that (and assuming your setup works), I'd guess that with my .pointposition/add point method, all points are created at the same time while with an 'emit from geometry'-node they're created one after the other. That would at least explain why mine doesn't work and yours does.

Mathaeus, I have it from this page: http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2012/en_us/userguide/index.html?url=files/ipart_instances_UsingAnimatedMasterObjects.htm,topicNumber=d28e291577

In the first block, it says "You can have animation offsets to be able to display each instance at a different frame of its animation during the particle simulation. If you're doing a crowd, for example, each character can walk at different paces using the same walk cycle."
Then in the next block the appropriate icetree is explained. But if it is actually appropriate to the text above is left open, it doesn't explicitly say anything about individually offset animation. I'd say it's just a case of ambiguous phrasing.

By the way, I agree with what you say is the best method for learning, that's how I came to be creating this scene in the first place. I don't need it for anything, I'm just learning.