ICE and Clusters?

[T.I.M.]

It's my second day playing with ICE and it looks pretty cool but it seems that I can't find a way to apply ice deformation to selected points . Does Ice work with clusters ? Is there a similar to a group node in Houdini ?

[Zac-Donald]

Tried weight maps yet? I think I've seen that in a few videos

[ThE_JacO]

Yes, it works with clusters.
You have two ways to go about it, one is using the filter field that you can find in many nodes, the other is to manually filter things yourself.

Pull the data you need, pull the cluster you want to filter by with its "isElement" property, and use a filter node with the cluster as a keep rule.

[T.I.M.]

Thank you! I will check it out!

[T.I.M.]

Yes this worked for point cluster.But I can't make it work for polygon cluster.I know that ICE works only with points but why then Polygon cluster has the same attributes like Point cluster.Is there a different way to filter this?And lets say for example I make a simple push deformer and put it in menu then how I can use it and apply it automatically on selected polygons?I am sorry for asking so many questions, but I couldn't find this in the Documentation .If somebody can provide scene example would be cool.Thank you!

[Ronald]

ICE is not limited to work on points. It actually does work on edges, polygons, polynodes, etc. For example you can drive UVs which are per polynode rather than per point.

One important concept to understand in ICE is the concept of "context". Check the documentation, it explains in details what this means and its well worth a read.

In short you can't just mix and match different types of components for example points and polygons. It wouldn't make sense because you don't necessarily have the same number of these components. For example, adding point positions with polygon normals does not make much sense you need to figure out how to map polygons with points.

In your case what you can use locations (one other important concept in ICE) to map between polygons and points. For example, to check whether a point is in a polygon cluster you can do GetData on "Self.PointLocation" and connect it to another GetData. Then fetch in the second GetData node the IsElement attribute on the polygon cluster.

Hope this helps,

- Ronald

[T.I.M.]

Thank you it helps!