Light intensity by proximty - ICE noobness ;)- *SOLVED*

[Kerro Perro]

Hi guys,

I'm still learning about ICE and to that end i'm trying a little effect that would be usefull in later (and bigger) projects of mine.

I made a row of lights (VRay lights in this instance but that shouldn't matter AFAIK) a null that passes by them - now i want the lights to get brighter when the null gets closer end dimmer when the null goes farther. Now i made an extremely simple setup for a single light that works:

ProximityIntensity.PNG

The distance gets rescaled to a range of brightness.

But it gets troublesome when i want to add more lights. 2 big problems. First is that i don't know how to easily get multiple properties into the ICE tree, sort of like the way you can do a multi selection and control them in a single ppg. Because adding all the lights one by one is a hassle with 15 lights but would be impossible with say a 100.

FullTree.PNG

Unfortunately that wasn't the only problem - when i added the other 14 lights the values got all screwed up in a very odd way. If i had a ppg open on one of the lights the values would be changed correctly when moving the null but the "unsupervised" lights keep giving me strange values or just sort of "freeze" at a certain value.

Now i'm planning to do another try with instanced lights or even mesh emmiters but i was very curious as to you guys' oppinion on the best way to tackle this effect, as a very experienced Softimage master said it to me recently: "sometimes it gets confusing with ICE as there are a many ways to solve the same problem" ;)

[xsisupport]

I would create a compound and use ApplyICEOp (in a script) to apply that compound to the lights, rather than doing it all on the sphere (that's where I assume you have your ICE tree).

[Kerro Perro]

Yup that totally works That really confirms "when stuck ask for advice" - i was about to do a very complicated tree with vray light mesh instanced on a point could etc.
I had the ICE tree on a null wich the lights hung off and got in my head from doing some ICE rigging a while back that it's good practice to keep all the ICE operations on a single tree on a null - wich at the time it was but not in this case.

I used your addon from the thread "apply ICEOp on multiple objects" to apply the ICEOp on all the lights, nice one!

[Chris_TC]

While we're at it, is there a technical reason why we can't set data on a group? Or better yet, use string operations to intelligently set data on objects called sth. like "object1" to "object50"?

[xsisupport]

While we're at it, is there a technical reason why we can't set data on a group? Or better yet, use string operations to intelligently set data on objects called sth. like "object1" to "object50"?

Scene references are part of a pre-evaluation stage in ICE. The references are resolved once only, and then the tree is evaluated (over and over as required).

http://xsisupport.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/ice-looping-over-group-members-and-setting-data/