What you'll learn

In this series of lessons, we'll learn how to use the Interactive Creative Environment inside Softimage to create particle effects. We built this course for people who have never touched ICE because it's such a powerful system that users of other applications find very useful. We'll begin this project by learning the basic concepts behind ICE, such as the main uses of ICE, the basic workflow of ICE and how ICE nodes work together. We'll then learn about the various data types and the importance of context while working in ICE. Once we understand the ideas behind ICE, we will take a few lessons to familiarize ourselves with the Softimage interface. Then we will begin building a particle simulation from the ground up and learn about various ICE nodes and workflows. We'll finish by rendering out an image sequence of our finished particle simulation. This series of lessons was designed to launch someone who has never touched Softimage into being comfortable with the interface and working with ICE. This will allow us to create particle simulations in ICE quickly and easily and begin exploring this powerful platform. Software required: Softimage 2011.