Hello all.  I’m new with ICE, and need to find a way of plotting the animation of instanced geometry.  Both Position and Rotation.  I’ve got a way to do so with the position information, but not orientation. 

Essentially, my brute force method is to “scatter” instanced geometry onto the points/clusters of the Ice particles, then plotting this animation.  works great, but no rotation.  It seems so straight forward, but it appears that the problem is that the clusters themselves don’t rotate…

Any thoughts?  much appreciated.

Hi,
the way I’ve done this in the past is by using ICE kinematics on nulls (you’ll need to enable the hidden environment variable to allow this).
Create a dummy point cloud that will be used as a host for writing to the kinematics of the nulls. Get the original point cloud and bring it into the tree. You’re going to want to filter the incoming point cloud by ID, so you can choose which particle to match.
You’ll pull its position and rotation and set them to the kinematics of a null object.
If your ID is found, you can pass on its position or rotation. Otherwise pass on a default value e.g. (0,0,0).

You still can’t set this data to the kinematics because of a context mismatch. You have a set of data taken from the point cloud, but need to set a single value to the null’s kinematics. Use the statistical node ‘Get maximum in Set’, which collapses the data set to a single value.
Since you’ve filtered the set’s position/rotation values by ID, setting all non-matches to zero, the maximum in the data set will be the correct values for your chosen particle.
You should now be able to set this data to the pos/ori kinematics of your null.

Once you get this to work, you can plot the animation on your null and delete the kinematics ICE tree. If you have a load of particles you want to plot, it’s pretty straightforward to write a script that’ll automate the whole process, even choosing particles from your point selection.

I hope all that made sense, I just wish I had a tree to share....