I’ve recently started using ICE pretty regularly at work, nothing too complicated so far, mostly for controlling groups of instanced geometry like soap bubbles floating through the air and lines of marching ants. With the ants especially It became apparent that the default emitters had a couple of interesting “features” that would cause problems, getting a predictable, steady, stream of particles to come out at say, 1 per second, for example, was much more difficult than anticipated. So with some digging around and a point in the right direction from one of the many nice folk at XSI Base, I set about making my own emitter from scratch. Since at the time I couldn’t find any tutorials that explained the process from start to finish (although this was very helpful) I thought I’d write up my own. The following tutorial assumes you know Softimage and that you’ve perhaps had a poke around in ICE without delving in too far, it sets out to take you from an empty pointcloud to a simple particle emitter compound you can export and use again.
