Here’s a quick video walk-through of the procedure described here in the docs.

http://vimeo.com/25667597

As Guillaume points out in the comments to my previous post, you can easily switch to other version of the Simulation Root by right-clicking the node, pointing to Versions, and choosing version 1.0.

If you’re trying to build a Lagoa effect from scratch, as described here, you may hit a little gotcha:

If you look into the Lagao presets, you’ll see that they get around this by using a simplified version of the Simulation Root:

You can import this compound from here:
$XSI_HOME\Addons\ICEFlowBuilder\Data\Compounds\Particles\Simulation Root.xsicompound

UPDATE: In the comments, Guillaume points out that you can simply right-click the Simulation Root node to change versions:

Based on a recent thread on the XSI mailing list, here’s a simple example of using raycast to find points on the other side of a mesh.

In a nutshell:

• Negate the point normal so it points inside the mesh, and use that as the raycast direction.
• For the start position of the raycast, don’t use the PointPosition (because you’ll just get the same point back as the raycast hit). Instead, move along the normal a bit and use that as the starting point for the raycast.
• In 2012, you can use the VertexIndex attribute to get the ID of the “opposite” point.

Resizing an implicit cube using ICE. Possibly a “stupid ICE trick” 😉

h/t Eric Mootz and his emFlock tutorials (which use expressions to do the same thing).

Here’s one way to to build an array that contains a sequence of numbers like 1,5,9,13, …, where each number in the sequence is the previous number + 4.

A quick look into the type and context of ports and how sometimes you have to “force” (or “initialize”) the type and context. Hey, ICE can’t always resolve everything automagically 😉

http://vimeo.com/24735850

Related: See this xsibase thread , and this Paul Smith video tutorial.

FYI, this is by design. The Simulate Rigid Bodies node doesn’t support sub-frame simulation.