Chris Gardner show how it is possible to transfer Softimage Particle instance orders into Maya. Chris created this post as a follow up to an old discussion on the Softimage mailing list concerning transferring particle instance orders from Soft into Maya. Check out the post for ICE instances into Maya for a step by step look at doing this.

…You will need an attribute to control the order of instances in your ICE tree and then to cache out and pass to Maya…

This is done by creating an attribute to control the order of instances in the ICE tree and then caching that out and using that cache in Maya and recreating the instances the order that they appeared in Soft.