Small enhancements have been made to everyday workflows including the Explorer, Schematic View, Scene Layer Manager, Render Tree, Bone Primitive, Reference Models and the Weight Editor.

Artists can now use Syflex cloth to create and edit realistic cloth effects, due to the more flexible node-based workflow of ICE. The recent Lagoa Multiphysics simulation system can help create more realistic simulations of the dynamic behaviour of liquids, cloth, foam, plastic and soft body collisions, plus incompressible fluids, inelastic, elastic and plastic deformations.

Better interoperability with the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 products Maya, 3ds Max and Mudbox should ease pipeline integration into production for demanding television, games and movies. The SDK has been extended, with more support for Maya nCache format and the Autodesk FBX asset exchange format. FBX 2012 support lets artists transfer stereo camera rigs, vector displacement maps, multiple UVs, and subframe samples for icecache and PC2 in and out of Softimage, making it safer to pass assets between products.

The new ICE FX Builder is a module menu toolbar that automatically connects compounds and nodes for simple modification and extension of effects using the standard editing workflow.

Autodesk anticipates that Softimage 2012 will be available in English and Japanese in April 2011. Autodesk Subscription with Gold Support will be available for purchase simultaneously. Softimage 2012 should also be available as part of the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 which offers Softimage together with either Maya or 3ds Max and Mudbox and Maya 2012. www.autodesk.com