Currently ICE has no provisions for creating or destroying faces or edges, which means we can’t create compounds directly in ice which for instance shatter objects. So what do you do if you need a “blastcode” type destruction effect in XSI? One solution is to approach the problem with XSI’s rigid bodies, but they have their own issues and it’s frustrating not to be able to leverage some of ICE’s power for this kind of thing.
The good news is that if you can create fragments outside of ICE you can use ICE instancing to go from pre-fragmented instance masters to ICE particles. For instance, build a brick wall out of individual bricks, instance them in ICE with the same SRTs, and do a rigid body simulation in ICE. Or in the examples below, use ICE to animate geometry fragments or polygons.
To achieve these effects I’ve written a script which extracts selected polys from a model and groups them as needed, and a compound which seamlessly takes a group of instance masters and creates identically placed ICE instances ready for simulation.