Here’s a video I put together for anyone who’s looking for a fast overview of ICE. The video demonstrates some basic techniques with particles, and mostly uses the menus to keep things simple.

It’s worth mentioning that ICE can do a whole lot more than just particles. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:

• Mesh Deformation
• Animation of object transforms (ICE kinematics)
• Rigid body simulation
• Cloth simulation (via Syflex ICE nodes)
• Procedural modelling (as of XSI 2012)
• Fluid simulation (with built in Lagoa Multiphysics, or alternatively emFluid)
• Point rendering (via emRenderPointCloud)

So there really is no limit as to what you can do with ICE, and the best thing about it is that it’s just about the fastest thing out there.

If you’re into programming, then it also has a great SDK which allows you to develop your own multi-threaded ICE nodes, just in case there’s something you need to do that it can’t support natively. (So far, I’ve only needed to do that once when I had a particularly complex bit of array sorting and processing to do).