ya gotit, edit instead of explode is the key. I made a new ICE tree and now everything is working good, thx for showing how. I was curious to follow your node logic, but must confess, although I'm quite 3D savvy in XSI, this is really new to me. I understand the concept of scripts, represented by nodes, that can be tied together and their variables and functions can be edited, but oh boy, this takes a while before getting fluent with it.
I wanted to make a distance animation, that in this case starts behind the car, and then moves in front of the car during the course of action, but got stuck at the behind-checkbox. Checking if the distance needs to be a value from negative to positive, while zero is the closest, negative is behind and positive is in-front.
Basically the goal is, now that the scene works good, to create the view- templates (let me call it so) to define view sequences.
Meaning a compound of multiple view-elements of how the object is finally seen: e.g.
1st-element 10sec.: distance animation from behind to in front;
2nd-element 5sec: stay in front of the object;
3rd-element 2 sec: jump to a fixed-watching-position and watching the object from there;
4th-element 6sec: leaving the fixed-watching-position and make animation towards a certain distance again ...
something like that, and combine it into a template, so I can make the different viewing templates and start call them up manually from something like a control-panel during the animation runs. Connecting the templates to number keys on the keyboard for example.