Moderator edit: I extracted the posts in this topic from the thread - HB

Speaking of ICE tools, I've got a question: when I make a custom ICE deformer and add it to the menu, I cannot apply it to multiple objects at once. If I select 5 objects and pick my deformer in the menu, the ICE tree is only added to one of the objects. Anything else in Softimage always works with multiple selected objects (e.g. a push deformer). Is this something that will be fixed or is there a technical reason for it?

By "the menu" do you mean that you used User Tools > Add Operator to Menu?
If so, I think that ends up calling ApplyICEOp on the selection, but ApplyICEOp works only on one object at a time.
The generated menu callback needs to be updated to loop over the selection and call ApplyICEOp.

That's right, yes.


So is this something we will see in future versions? I'm not a coder, so I have to rely on the built-in functions.
Also, it would be great if you added the ability to make modeling operators. If I build an ICE Topo compound that generates some type of geometry from scratch, it would be awesome if I could add it to the Get->Primitive menu. When picking the command, Soft would first have to make an empty polymesh, then apply the ICE tree.

P.S.: When Chinny showed off the new thickness operator, he used it on multiple objects at once. It brought up three separate PPGs (non-ICE operators open up a multi PPG), but at least it worked in one go.

Couldn't you just as easily create a little script, that queries the selection list, loops over every selected object to apply the individual ICEOp to it and add this custom command to the menu instead of the ICEOp itself?

In your content folder should be a script which does exactly that. It's a script from the ICE rigging examples. Otherwise search for ICE rabbit rig on the web. The script works in such a way that it adds an ice tree plus a node to an object. You should be able to alter the script so that it works for you. The objects to which the ice deformer gets apllied are all in one group.

Cheers

Thank you for the pointers! I realize that there are ways to do this by hand. But I would think that this should be the standard behavior "out of the box", considering everything else in Softimage works the same way and the new ICE modeling tools in 2012.5 seem to also work on multiple objects.
I had seen Stephen, Graham and Luc-Eric post, so maybe it was a thinly veiled feature request more than anything

The current "Add Operators to Menu" is implemented in VBScript in
%XSI_HOME%\Addons\ICEUserTools\Application\Plugins\ICEUserTools.vbs.

Really, it became obsolete when we added the ICE toolbar in the 2011 SAP release.


Here's a Python version that adds ICE operators to either the Particles > Create or Deform > Create menus in the ICE toolbar.
When you apply the ops, they will be applied to all selected objects.
The addon adds a "PSS Add Operators to Menu" command to the User Tools menu of the ICE Tree view, so it does add a bit of clutter (since I cannot programmatically remove the original Add Operators to Menu command).


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12898205/AddICEOperatorsToMenus.xsiaddon

Update: Let me know if you hit any problems with this addon. I tested it a bit, but not extensively ;-)

Wow, that's some great support there. You guys should be proud of the architecture you've built that allows you to provide custom hotfix solutions like that.

Very impressive.

Wow, thank you very much! I will check it out

Hmmmm, how would I do the opposite? Delete all ICe operators on a group of objects. There's the applyICeop command, but no remove or delete command.

Anybody?