RE: Softimage 2014
Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn't let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each stroke should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it's nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I'd sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya's artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I'd be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting...Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it's a bit hit and miss. We're not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don't have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint - Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I'm not a Max user, so don't ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive - something which softimage's paint workflow is anything but. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. Preserve UVs: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. Paint: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. Locking topology: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Re: Softimage 2014
That's why I talked about workarounds, and I'm not talking about ICE here. When I started my brush I was a C++ newbie, but now I'm sure it's just a matter of a few days, it's really not that complicated, I'll try to finish/improve it a soon as my contract is finished and release it for free. anyway, I only found this about max brush, I can't find any tolopology brush modifier: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-CA6D812A-C92B-4037-8810-E0257C6B61AE.htm,topicNumber=d30e127452 and this: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/files/GUID-C87493C2-6E85-4DCB-A0AC-F355A9AA174F.htmhttp://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-1D637181-862A-49C9-B6BE-4E7982549C57.htm,topicNumber=d30e119519 that can be replaced by this in SI: https://vimeo.com/41703655#at=0 you can as Piotrek for his swim uvs: https://vimeo.com/46540432 Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos 2013/3/29 Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. ** ** I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. ** ** Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. ** ** Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 ** ** Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. *Locking topology*: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. ** ** Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Re: Softimage 2014
That would be Splendid Ahmidou !!! i would owe you a debt in the afterlife ! On 29 March 2013 08:40, Ahmidou Lyazidi ahmidou@gmail.com wrote: That's why I talked about workarounds, and I'm not talking about ICE here. When I started my brush I was a C++ newbie, but now I'm sure it's just a matter of a few days, it's really not that complicated, I'll try to finish/improve it a soon as my contract is finished and release it for free. anyway, I only found this about max brush, I can't find any tolopology brush modifier: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-CA6D812A-C92B-4037-8810-E0257C6B61AE.htm,topicNumber=d30e127452 and this: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/files/GUID-C87493C2-6E85-4DCB-A0AC-F355A9AA174F.htmhttp://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-1D637181-862A-49C9-B6BE-4E7982549C57.htm,topicNumber=d30e119519 that can be replaced by this in SI: https://vimeo.com/41703655#at=0 you can as Piotrek for his swim uvs: https://vimeo.com/46540432 Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos 2013/3/29 Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. ** ** I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. ** ** Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. ** ** Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 ** ** Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. *Locking topology*: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. ** ** Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Camera distance to an object
Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. --
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez wrote: Redshift 3d
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. On Mar 29, 2013 9:20 AM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez wrote: Redshift 3d
Re: [Inspiration] Tron Legacy's screens. Motion graphics at its best
Very interesting Makings of Tron motion graphics, designs and researches here : https://vimeo.com/mn8er/videos/page:1/sort:date Le 06/04/2011 22:53, Marc-Andre Carbonneau a écrit : Motion graphics at its best http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178 Funny guy too. J MAC
Re: Camera distance to an object
It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. --
Re: Camera distance to an object
Thx Ben. The thing is the distance between node output is almost twice the distance reported by the viewport. If I use the value of the Distance Between node, the focus is farther than the expected. I am right now dividing the result by 2 and I think I am getting there and getting the focus plane where I want. I am trying to figure out the logic on this and the only thing that comes up to my mind is that maybe the focus distance is splitted in two. One half is from camera to object and the other is from object to camera. Don't know if I explained myself or is there some logic into this. 2013/3/29 Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.comwrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. -- --
Re: Camera distance to an object
Hey Ben, the farther offset the null is off center to the center of the camera view the more off the DOF would be because the DOF effect is sets in respect to the viewplane of the camera and it would take some Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotenuse) to get the desired major cathetus, which is the Distance between Camera Center and a Plane from the shorter cathetus. To avoid that, it´s easier to constraint the camera to look at the null, then the hypothenuse snaps back into the longer cathetus and there is no offset anymore to worry about. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 10:06, Ben Davis wrote: It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. --
Re: Camera distance to an object
Makes sense, thanks Tim! That means that the info from the Distance to Output Camera is doing exactly what you need Emilio, since when centered the ICETree info matches perfectly. -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Hey Ben, the farther offset the null is off center to the center of the camera view the more off the DOF would be because the DOF effect is sets in respect to the viewplane of the camera and it would take some Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Hypotenusehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotenuse) to get the desired major cathetus, which is the Distance between Camera Center and a Plane from the shorter cathetus. To avoid that, it愀 easier to constraint the camera to look at the null, then the hypothenuse snaps back into the longer cathetus and there is no offset anymore to worry about. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 10:06, Ben Davis wrote: It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. -- attachment: DOF_center.PNG
Re: Softimage 2014
For brush-based sculpting, Blender also has great tools if anyone's looking for inspiration. DAN On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: That would be Splendid Ahmidou !!! i would owe you a debt in the afterlife ! On 29 March 2013 08:40, Ahmidou Lyazidi ahmidou@gmail.com wrote: That's why I talked about workarounds, and I'm not talking about ICE here. When I started my brush I was a C++ newbie, but now I'm sure it's just a matter of a few days, it's really not that complicated, I'll try to finish/improve it a soon as my contract is finished and release it for free. anyway, I only found this about max brush, I can't find any tolopology brush modifier: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-CA6D812A-C92B-4037-8810-E0257C6B61AE.htm,topicNumber=d30e127452 and this: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/files/GUID-C87493C2-6E85-4DCB-A0AC-F355A9AA174F.htmhttp://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-1D637181-862A-49C9-B6BE-4E7982549C57.htm,topicNumber=d30e119519 that can be replaced by this in SI: https://vimeo.com/41703655#at=0 you can as Piotrek for his swim uvs: https://vimeo.com/46540432 Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos 2013/3/29 Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. ** ** I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. ** ** Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. ** ** Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 ** ** Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. *Locking topology*: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. ** ** Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Re: Camera distance to an object
Yes it's working with the null centered. But what if I want the focus on some moving object that is not always in the center of the camera and coming near? It is like a follow focus rig. 2013/3/29 Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com Makes sense, thanks Tim! That means that the info from the Distance to Output Camera is doing exactly what you need Emilio, since when centered the ICETree info matches perfectly. -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Hey Ben, the farther offset the null is off center to the center of the camera view the more off the DOF would be because the DOF effect is sets in respect to the viewplane of the camera and it would take some Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Hypotenusehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotenuse) to get the desired major cathetus, which is the Distance between Camera Center and a Plane from the shorter cathetus. To avoid that, it愀 easier to constraint the camera to look at the null, then the hypothenuse snaps back into the longer cathetus and there is no offset anymore to worry about. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 10:06, Ben Davis wrote: It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. -- --
Re: Polynoid QA
Hello guys, we are really happy the Halo work is liked here. Thanks a lot! Here's another piece we just finished: http://www.polynoid.tv/mtv-idol/ Pit is constantly thinking about writing on monophyl again. :) We all really hope we find time for it soon. Who will be at FMX this year? There'll be a Polynoid Party on Tuesday. Would be great to meet some of you there! For those who are interested in more details about Halo: We'll talk about it and other recent productions on Thursday Morning. http://www.fmx.de/program.html#!/event/1219 Cheers and all the best from Berlin, Ilija On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:26 PM, adrian wyer adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com wrote: ** ** ** ** ** positive press for Softimage, get to it Autodesk...hmmm ** ** http://motionographer.com/2013/03/25/halo-4-fud-title-sequence-polynoid/** ** ** ** a ** ** Adrian Wyer Fluid Pictures 75-77 Margaret St. London W1W 8SY ++44(0) 207 580 0829 adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com www.fluid-pictures.com ** ** Fluid Pictures Limited is registered in **England** and ** **Wales. Company number:5657815 VAT number: 872 6893 71 ** ** -- Ilija Brunck +573183232393 +491773402874 il...@polynoid.tv www.polynoid.tv
Re: Softimage 2014
Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn’t let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each “stroke” should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it’s nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I’d sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform ( http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya’s artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I’d be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting…Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [ mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sebastien Sterling *Sent:* Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. *Locking topology*: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles?
Hi Gray I don't see any attachments. This happened last time you posted a screenshot too. I couldn't find the attachments On 28/03/2013 6:46 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Do these compounds help? I've posted before but for some reason the attachments don't seem to make it into the archives. They were designed to copy particle instances to real topology, but obviously you don't actually need instances but just an integer for the object index in the group. Usage notes: To use, put Convert Instances to Mesh in an ICE tree on an empty mesh. It works only with the self object. You also need to store the shape index on the point cloud and reference it in the compound's ppg. To transfer attributes, attach one of the Transfer compounds to the Execute port - there's one for each component type. If you transfer the MaterialIDs, then you can use the Copy Materials checkbox. This works only if all objects in the group have identical Materials arrays. The transfer is based on finding locations on the group geometry, so it's best to move the instance masters apart if they overlap. It uses the 2013 version of Build Array from Set which supports topology-type attributes. To use it with Softimage v2012, you'll need to replace it with Build Array from Per Point Data. gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 06:30 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles? Thanks but I need it as actual geometry using ice topology On Mar 28, 2013 6:09 PM, Daryl Dunlap twinsnakes...@gmail.commailto:twinsnakes...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Eric, There's an example in the Docs for just that scenario. http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/index.html?url=files/ipart_instances_UsingGroupsofMasterObjects.htm,topicNumber=d30e291285 On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 6:03 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.commailto:ethivie...@gmail.com wrote: Trying to clone a group of meshes and place them at particle positions from a cloud using ICE Topo. Is there a way to get any of the built in compounds to do this? Not seeing any compounds or sample scenes doing this. So to review I have 5 meshes in a group and a particle cloud. I want to randomly get a mesh out of the group and stick it where a particle is. Eric Thivierge http://www.ethivierge.com
Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles?
I can see them (Gmail) DAN On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Stephen Blair stephenrbl...@gmail.comwrote: Hi Gray I don't see any attachments. This happened last time you posted a screenshot too. I couldn't find the attachments On 28/03/2013 6:46 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Do these compounds help? I've posted before but for some reason the attachments don't seem to make it into the archives. They were designed to copy particle instances to real topology, but obviously you don't actually need instances but just an integer for the object index in the group. Usage notes: To use, put Convert Instances to Mesh in an ICE tree on an empty mesh. It works only with the self object. You also need to store the shape index on the point cloud and reference it in the compound's ppg. To transfer attributes, attach one of the Transfer compounds to the Execute port - there's one for each component type. If you transfer the MaterialIDs, then you can use the Copy Materials checkbox. This works only if all objects in the group have identical Materials arrays. The transfer is based on finding locations on the group geometry, so it's best to move the instance masters apart if they overlap. It uses the 2013 version of Build Array from Set which supports topology-type attributes. To use it with Softimage v2012, you'll need to replace it with Build Array from Per Point Data. gray From: softimage-bounces@listproc.**autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com[mailto: softimage-bounces@**listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 06:30 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.**com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles? Thanks but I need it as actual geometry using ice topology On Mar 28, 2013 6:09 PM, Daryl Dunlap twinsnakes...@gmail.com** mailto:twinsnakes...@gmail.com** wrote: Hey Eric, There's an example in the Docs for just that scenario. http://download.autodesk.com/**global/docs/softimage2013/en_** us/userguide/index.html?url=**files/ipart_instances_** UsingGroupsofMasterObjects.**htm,topicNumber=d30e291285http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/index.html?url=files/ipart_instances_UsingGroupsofMasterObjects.htm,topicNumber=d30e291285 On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 6:03 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com mailto:e**thivie...@gmail.com ethivie...@gmail.com wrote: Trying to clone a group of meshes and place them at particle positions from a cloud using ICE Topo. Is there a way to get any of the built in compounds to do this? Not seeing any compounds or sample scenes doing this. So to review I have 5 meshes in a group and a particle cloud. I want to randomly get a mesh out of the group and stick it where a particle is. --**-- Eric Thivierge http://www.ethivierge.com
Re: Kojima san uses Softimage in MGS 5! Again!
I have to say that while BF4 might have pretty pixels it does looks very pale compared to MGS in art direction. There is level of symbolism and depth in it that BF completely lacks. Different games naturally - just my opinion. - J On 28 March 2013 16:02, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Nice but I think this is better looking. ** ** www.gametrailers.com/videos/2z61g8/battlefield-4-fishing-in-baku-gameplay-demo ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *olivier jeannel *Sent:* 28 mars 2013 09:58 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Kojima san uses Softimage in MGS 5! Again! ** ** Japaneses, when they do things, they don't do half... Excellent video, thanks for showing it ! Le 28/03/2013 13:56, Szabolcs Matefy a écrit : http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=FQMbxzTUuSg#t=1880s But worth a look the whole thing…amazing J ___ This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. If verification is required please request a hard-copy version. Crytek GmbH - http://www.crytek.com - Grüneburgweg 16-18, 60322 Frankfurt - HRB77322 Amtsgericht Frankfurt a. Main- UST IdentNr.: DE20432461 - Geschaeftsfuehrer: Avni Yerli, Cevat Yerli, Faruk Yerli ** ** -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi
Re: Kojima san uses Softimage in MGS 5! Again!
Personally, I really like the detail in the BF3 charactersassetsenvironment. If you google a bit you can find a few of the characters in 3ds/maya/xsi format, including textures sometimes, there´s loads of people using these meshes for their own mods or as proportionsdetail reference for their own (realtime) meshes. In terms of weapons and recognizeable gear detail, the BF stuff is really sweet. All the latest and greatest custom options for your SAW or M4 you could want... The MGS5 stuff on the other hand has obviously more focus on telling a story in a different scenario, e.g. it has more options to deviate from the battlefield setting. But in general both games have kick arse art direction and attention to detail imo. What´s really sweet in the MGS5 presentation is how detailed they show their engine and how they go about creating believable detail especially in textures, lighting and shading. A lot of that stuff translates really nice to offline rendering, too. One nice bit for example is the angle-dependent glossiness of surfaces in shading, just great. Or the wetness effect they get my globally pushing glossiness on demand. When I first saw the first few examples in the MGS5 engine, I thought it looked boring until I realized that was because the engine first of all creates real-world lighting with proper gamma, which means images may initially look less saturatedcontrasty than your average game/hip-hop video look but it´s easy enough to get that look if you want. The BF engine is also really nice, thought. In conlcusion, I am deeply impressed from both. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 13:42, Juhani Karlsson wrote: I have to say that while BF4 might have pretty pixels it does looks very pale compared to MGS in art direction. There is level of symbolism and depth in it that BF completely lacks. Different games naturally - just my opinion. - J On 28 March 2013 16:02, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Nice but I think this is better looking. ** ** www.gametrailers.com/videos/2z61g8/battlefield-4-fishing-in-baku-gameplay-demo ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *olivier jeannel *Sent:* 28 mars 2013 09:58 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Kojima san uses Softimage in MGS 5! Again! ** ** Japaneses, when they do things, they don't do half... Excellent video, thanks for showing it ! Le 28/03/2013 13:56, Szabolcs Matefy a écrit : http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=FQMbxzTUuSg#t=1880s But worth a look the whole thing…amazing J ___ This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. If verification is required please request a hard-copy version. Crytek GmbH - http://www.crytek.com - Grüneburgweg 16-18, 60322 Frankfurt - HRB77322 Amtsgericht Frankfurt a. Main- UST IdentNr.: DE20432461 - Geschaeftsfuehrer: Avni Yerli, Cevat Yerli, Faruk Yerli ** **
Friday Flashback #113
Friday Flashback #113 2008 VCC Blaupunkt ICE demo http://wp.me/powV4-2Ep
Finalgathering made less frustrating: mx_fgshooter
Hi guys, there´s a lot to be desired about mental ray´s implementation and user friendliness. I don´t even want to start about having at least an in depth documentation including practical examples. Nevertheless, there´s yet another node that may come in handy but has probably slipped your radar: mip_fgshooter It is supposed to be used to add finalgather calculations from additional cameras to your current frame´s fgmap or your *.fgmap in general. I can´t express how frustrated I am about the implementation in Softimage. If you ever had hoped to having to figure out how to enter 4x4 matrixes and get the thing working yourself, brace for a lot of frustration. Or use this implementation. Thank you Denis Belyatsky! http://maxfoxlab.com/mx_fgshooter.html Hats off. If you push his implementation hard, you´ll notice the camera_shooter_cams will always have to point to the world origin to give realiable values for their resulting 4x4 matrixes entered into the render cam´s mip_fgshooter item list. Sofar, I haven´t been able to verify if that is a limitation of using their [cameraname].kineGlobal as the source for the 4x4 matrix or if that is due to the way the mip_fgshooter node interprets coordinates? In any case, Denis plugin is a great helper in actually making flickerfree FG available to the average user who may sure not be able to derive and properly set a 4x4 matrix himself. In terms of useability, I would have expected mip_fg_shooter to have a list entry field where you pick your cameras and that´s it. Like Lightlinking for selective light, even SRT coordinates would have been better but transform matrixes, really? That´s defeating the whole point of keeping it simple unless one could drag and drop a camera into the Rendertree and at least connect it directly there. Which you can´t... Cheers, tim
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
On 3/29/2013 10:23 AM, Octavian Ureche wrote: Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI)
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:20 AM You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 1:19 AM How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez Friday, March 29, 2013 12:38 AM A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no time. The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa.--
RE: Finalgathering made less frustrating: mx_fgshooter
I did tests with the fgshooter a few weeks ago on the classroom scene. And yes, its implemention is awful. I used the fgshooter addon too, its way easier then. Btw. I'm also still on the classroom scene and added light and camera animation, but I had no time to finish it yet. My goal is to make it as realistic as possible and bring mentalray onto its knees.:) Of course it has to be flickerfree, what is very hard when the sun is animated and it goes to the horizon resulting in only a few very bright spots in the scene that has to lit the whole room evenly. -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 15:36 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Finalgathering made less frustrating: mx_fgshooter Hi guys, there´s a lot to be desired about mental ray´s implementation and user friendliness. I don´t even want to start about having at least an in depth documentation including practical examples. Nevertheless, there´s yet another node that may come in handy but has probably slipped your radar: mip_fgshooter It is supposed to be used to add finalgather calculations from additional cameras to your current frame´s fgmap or your *.fgmap in general. I can´t express how frustrated I am about the implementation in Softimage. If you ever had hoped to having to figure out how to enter 4x4 matrixes and get the thing working yourself, brace for a lot of frustration. Or use this implementation. Thank you Denis Belyatsky! http://maxfoxlab.com/mx_fgshooter.html Hats off. If you push his implementation hard, you´ll notice the camera_shooter_cams will always have to point to the world origin to give realiable values for their resulting 4x4 matrixes entered into the render cam´s mip_fgshooter item list. Sofar, I haven´t been able to verify if that is a limitation of using their [cameraname].kineGlobal as the source for the 4x4 matrix or if that is due to the way the mip_fgshooter node interprets coordinates? In any case, Denis plugin is a great helper in actually making flickerfree FG available to the average user who may sure not be able to derive and properly set a 4x4 matrix himself. In terms of useability, I would have expected mip_fg_shooter to have a list entry field where you pick your cameras and that´s it. Like Lightlinking for selective light, even SRT coordinates would have been better but transform matrixes, really? That´s defeating the whole point of keeping it simple unless one could drag and drop a camera into the Rendertree and at least connect it directly there. Which you can´t... Cheers, tim
Re: Softimage 2014
Stop asking things for modeling and texturing ! We're a particle system for God Sake ! :D Le 29/03/2013 12:15, Simon Reeves a écrit : Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.com mailto:szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn’t let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each “stroke” should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it’s nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I’d sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya’s artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I’d be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting…Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs *From:*softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sebastien Sterling *Sent:* Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com mailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt *From:*softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology.
RE: Softimage 2014
I think we should just go back to Softimage Particle? :) -- Joey Ponthieux LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) Mymic Technical Services NASA Langley Research Center __ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of olivier jeannel Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 1:02 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 Stop asking things for modeling and texturing ! We're a particle system for God Sake ! :D Le 29/03/2013 12:15, Simon Reeves a écrit : Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.commailto:szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn't let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each stroke should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it's nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I'd sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya's artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I'd be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting...Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.commailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it's a bit hit and miss. We're not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don't have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint - Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I'm not a Max user, so don't ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive - something which softimage's paint workflow is anything but. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM To:
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to the peeps at chaos group for that. Cheers On Mar 29, 2013 4:04 PM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov kamen.li...@chaosgroup.com Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com Friday, March 29, 2013 4:20 AM You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca Friday, March 29, 2013 1:19 AM How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com Friday, March 29, 2013 12:38 AM A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no time. The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa. -- postbox-contact.jpgcompose-unknown-contact.jpgpostbox-contact.jpg
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
What about Maxwell, which render has lots it's potential ? Christopher Sent from my Desktop ;-) Steven Caron Friday, March 29, 2013 2:19 PM you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 2:06 PM Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to the peeps at chaos group for that. Cheers Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 11:03 AM Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark.
RE: Softimage 2014
It's not about whether we can freeze a texture projection or not. The issue is about the Softimage API and it's limitations to do things we need to do to be really productive. There are areas which are not developed in line with our needs, and in some cases are blocking issues. Texture operator freezing was just one of them as you cannot effectively model and texture at the same time because freezing modeling construction history also freezes texture operators, but the relationships is not clear to the user. Once a texture operator is frozen, you lose certain abilities such as the 'preserve UVs' workflow. This effectively forces users to complete all modeling before beginning to texture. This is not realistic because in the case of games development the process is heavily iterative. Just because an asset is modeled and textured then sent into the game engine does not imply the asset needs no further work. In fact, it's just the opposite as the real work has just begun. Once an asset gets into a game engine, a whole other level of workflow enters the picture from game play, performance balancing, art direction, beta testing, market research, and so on. Assets on average go through at least 15-20 revisions before deemed 'approved'. That means an artist performing revisions is beginning with an asset that is completed with geometry and texture, but no construction history or texture operators present in the scene. The problem is the artist needs to make the same edits to textures as they would as if creating the textures from scratch - including preserve UVs, regularize, relax, unfold, and other common operations. This is the block as many of the functions aren't available once texture operators are frozen. You have to redo your work from scratch to get into an edit friendly position to continue the edit process which is prohibitively expensive in time and energy. The fact a software developer who claims to understand our market continues to push out workflows like this is rather frustrating. When project Moondust was first revealed, it was a very exciting moment because it hinted at the potential to remove many of the barriers we experience in production. While it certainly gave Softimage instant legitimacy in the area of Particle work, it didn't provide the same impact to other areas of the software, in many cases only retreading established ground, or not supporting as much as established systems. Modeling comes to mind. While topology generators are unique to ICE and not available in the C++ SDK, the rest of the ICE modeling system only supports a subset provided by the C++ SDK. This makes it very difficult to make custom tools because our assets are loaded with custom properties and metadata which are the main mechanisms to pass information from Softimage to our game engine. ICE doesn't support custom properties or metadata or cluster properties in many operations such as merging or copying which basically makes them off limits for production as using an ICE modeling tool would destroy data we need to maintain. From our perspective, it's as if ICE modeling doesn't exist. We'd prefer it be an option in our pipeline, but to make that a reality, systems need to be completed and barriers removed. It's a design issue. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Simon Reeves Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 4:15 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.commailto:szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn't let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each stroke should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it's nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I'd sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya's artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom
RE: Softimage 2014
Modo doesn't have construction history (afaik), what does it do to better deal with texturing and iterative workflow you mention? Le 2013-03-28 18:00, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com a écrit : Freeze isn’t ‘deadly’ per se, but it to get around many of the instabilities of Softimage we’ve had to resort to using it heavily. ** ** I don’t think it’s a case of which app mimics the workflow desired, it’s more a matter of what problem we’re trying to solve as artists producing content for a game development effort. ** ** What is deceiving is seeing a texture operator buried under a sample cluster, but it being affected by operations in the main construction history without a visual to inform users there is an existing relationship between the two. Users only look in the sample clusters when needing to get information such as the _Def property to animate the projection – which is not very often. When clicking “Freeze” or “Freeze M”, it doesn’t register in the user’s mind the texture operator(s) will be affected. You also cannot expect an ordinary user to hover the mouse over the operator to get information. That is more of a TD thing when developing a new tool or workflow and would be used in building test cases, prototypes, or diagnosing bugs reported by artists. A niche case. ** ** The construction history needs a concept of selective freezing as opposed to muting or disabling from a given location upwards. Groups of operators need to be able to be merged or rearranged independently, possibly even flagged to be immune from freezing so only surrounding operators are frozen. Yes, there are dependencies in some cases such as with deleting subcomponents, but a workflow needs to be devised to better inform and work with the user’s desires to edit topology. ** ** The most common reasons for freezing construction history are: ** ** 1) History gets too large causing performance slowdown and instability.*** * ** ** 2) Content is in a finished state and needs to be published for use in other scenes by other users. Example, a prop or tree which serves in a larger environment, possibly referenced in multiple locations (eg. Hundreds of times). Any construction history that requires evaluation only bogs down the entire scene N fold. ** ** One problem with the freeze mechanism is it’s not granular enough. Many a time an artist will accumulate hundreds or thousands of operators on the construction history while modeling, but can’t afford to freeze the entire stack because he many need to retain a specific subset which is providing a certain workflow enhancement specific to the asset. The subset that needs to be retained will be buried in the middle of the construction history and cannot be isolated without significant work on behalf of the user, or cannot be isolated due to technical limitations of Softimage’s architecture. Certainly been a gripe of mine dating back to v1.0. This is exactly the problem with texture operators. They live in the middle of the modeling construction history which forces the user to plan every edit ahead of time because as soon as they freeze even once, they’ve lost most of their texturing workflow such as the preserve UVs, or ability to unfold, or ability to use regularize and other needed features which are accepted as standards in other applications and can be applied in any order. I agree texturing should be the last step in the process, but game development is a heavily iterative process. It’s extremely rare for an asset to not get kicked back for revisions, usually tens or hundreds of times due to art direction or game design modifications. Sometimes even for performance reasons as it may tax the game engine too much by invoking too many batches or pull too many textures flooding TRAM. Therefore it’s not possible to do all modeling first, then texturing last. ** ** The tools need to recognize that fact first and foremost. If they don’t, then it doesn’t matter what fancy algorithms are used to unfold or do other fancy stuff because the amount of roadblocks of the basic workflow will outweigh the benefits provided by the fancy tools. This is exactly the reason why our character modeling team uses Modo instead of Softimage for their work. Modo’s tools aren’t all that fancy, but they work together in a nice convenient package. Softimage hasn’t evolved much in this area in at least a decade. ** ** ** ** Matt ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Luc-Eric Rousseau *Sent:* Thursday, March 28, 2013 1:49 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 ** ** which app works the way you think things should work? If Freeze is deadly in your pipeline, I'm thinking you could register a siOnBeginCommand event to
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, No i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
i wouldn't say arnold is as fast at displacement as a reyes renderer ought to be. also their is the quality to compare too. i really like arnold, but i hate to see it being built up to be magical without actual fact to back it up. i would hazard a guess that vray and arnold displacement are closer than you might think. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Steven, No i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Sort of as an aside, we were talking license counts the other day and discovered the -processing license flag. If you didn't know about this, it seems to allow you to not only process scenes with an arbitrary number of Softimage instances, but also lets you render using 3rd party renderers without pulling the limited xsibatch tokens. From what I can tell, you essentially have unlimited command line Softimages, but a fixed number of mental rays. Good news for people looking at 3rd party renderers, as you don't have to factor in the cost of bundled mental ray as you expand your farm, and you don't have to worry about implementing an .ass file pipeline (unless you want to for other reasons). I'm not sure it's actually changed anything in terms of what we would have bought, as we've got a fair number of xsibatch already, but it's just nice to know, and it's making it much easier to roll out a hybrid workflow.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Christopher, I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its beta as well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. I cannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i have not touched it since. Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first and foremost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat its solution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs to do a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant for me, as an individual, was that animation was out of the question unless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to wait a long time for the frames to be rendered. Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in an animation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind). This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnold from this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turn takes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do not precompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereas vray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choices to cheat its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which in turn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user. On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershader approach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not use light sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using a special shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked very realistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that time in terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, so you could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things before waiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell fire engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview or vray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature of the engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file), which stored lighting information from all the light sources. That meant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fix everything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. You could dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, and everything would update realtime in it's image editor. I hear now they have a nuke plugin for this. Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver. I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, and it had around 50 lights total. The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights on and off. Had it not been for this feature, i would have been rendering a week on the project. With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozen variations in half an hour from the same render. Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration was not that good nor stable back then. Maybe now things have changed, but last i looked, it was pretty much the same workflow. Cheers, O
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, You are right. Arnold is pretty much looked upon as the magical solution to everyone's rendering problems (i know because i certainly think it too when sh hits the fan with what i use), which tends to become annoying. But i'd love to see a displacement test of both. Unfortunately there's no trial version of arnold yet. What i'm thinking is maybe i could find someone on this list that has a similar proc as mine (i7 3770k 3.5 ghz), and we could share a similar scene with the same model and displacement map, just to get an idea of rendertimes and memory footprint at the same res. If anyone is up for it, send me a mail. I have a couple of days to kill until the next gig.
RE: Softimage 2014
The issue isn't about whether history is available or not. It's about whether the functions we need to use are usable at all times and in all contexts. Softimage texture workflow only works in specific contexts. That is the issue. Softimage has a construction history which is useful for some operations such as enveloping or putting modeling operations in the animation construction marker, but those same workflows can also cause problems as it does with texture operations in conjunction with modeling. As for specific examples in Modo's favor: 1) UV unfolding and pinning I've been screaming about the past few years. Softimage botched that one. Modo's pins allow the rest of the unpinned texture space to 'solve' in the unfolding process. It's also interactive. I specifically pointed out Modo in the feature requests I submitted, but whoever implemented the pinning feature obviously didn't read the notes. Modo's tools can be applied at any time and in any order. Softimage's cannot. That alone is HUGE. Softimage lacks basic tools such as splitting and merging UVs along selected boundaries, aligning islands, and other expected tools for working with pelts and texture spaces in general. Softimage has the low level features such as tearing mode, but you have to work really hard to select the parts of the texture space to rip apart and isolate as desired. Artists often think in terms of polygon boundaries and tearing along boundaries between body parts such as separating the hands from the arms, or inserting a cut line along the sides of fingers so they splay nicely for unfolding and painting. Pinning and movable pins is a big part of this workflow. It can be done in Softimage, but it takes significantly more effort - especially with the botched implementation of pinning and rigid black box method of unfold's implementation. Tools work nicely together in Modo. The capabilities are there in Softimage, but tools don't play together as they should, and many expected tools are not implemented correctly or exposed to the end user. 2) Symmetrical modeling such as wrists. It's often necessary to resize or reshape local areas of the character per art direction. In the case of wrists, sometimes they are too fat or too skinny, need to be lengthened or shortened, etc. This is a difficult task in Softimage as the symmetry transforms only work on points. Since Softimage computes reference frames on point selections and doesn't give the artist much input in orienting reference frames, it's a bit of teeth pulling experience to make these simple adjustments as local axes don't necessarily align along the limb's length and perpendicular to the width as desired. Even if the reference frames (centers) are aligned, Softimage doesn't interpret the rotations properly across the axis of symmetry preferring to handle the case in object or global space instead of COG or local. I have reported this issue more than once. Softimage scaling defaults to prevent shearing by scaling on the local axes. Sometimes modelers need the global axis, but as you can clearly see on the MCP, global is not an option for scaling. 3) Another example is locking subcomponents in the topology to prevent accidental editing. This is critical for working with objects that have to join seamlessly with other objects. Artists can lock the points (and normal, and UVs) on the boundary edge so they are not accidentally moved but still allow them to model with reckless abandon on the interior of the object to be quick and efficient. Specific example - faces for bodies. Our characters have customizable faces which are plug and play like a Mr. Potato Head doll. If the customer wants the skinny face, then the skinny face is plugged into the body. If the customer wants the fat face, then the fat face is plugged into the body. For this system to work, all the available faces must have the same contours so they plug into the head seamlessly without cracks. When our library consists of 500+ faces and only one person to do that work, the artist needs the comfort of being able to work quickly without fear of destroying the asset or making it incompatible with other assets (body) it needs to work with. For faces it means locking the contours so they cannot be edited. Modo provides this functionality. Softimage does not. Softimage locks the entire topology of none of the topology. Even if custom operators are written to do the job, they are prone to be removed the next time the artist clicks 'freeze' or 'freeze M'. We've had this very discussion already. I have already submitted and described the above items in beta cycles and we had discussions about them. I'm really starting to wonder if it was a waste of time. I'm not a Modo user, but our character artists repeatedly come to me for basic things Softimage should handle, but doesn't. They want to use Softimage as it would
Re: Softimage 2014
No we are now (officially) Visual Effects and Animation Software :) On 29/03/2013 1:01 PM, olivier jeannel wrote: Stop asking things for modeling and texturing ! We're a particle system for God Sake ! :D Le 29/03/2013 12:15, Simon Reeves a écrit : Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.com mailto:szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn’t let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each “stroke” should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it’s nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I’d sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32 http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya’s artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I’d be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting…Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sebastien Sterling *Sent:* Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com mailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
just do it! start a new thread. provide the vray side with whatever scene and/or parameters and i am sure someone with an arnold license will step up. i wont promise i can but if i find the time i might contribute an arnold test. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: If anyone is up for it, send me a mail. I have a couple of days to kill until the next gig.
Re: Softimage 2014
well then sit back and watch Houdini cream you :P On 29 March 2013 21:21, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: ** No we are now (officially) Visual Effects and Animation Software :) On 29/03/2013 1:01 PM, olivier jeannel wrote: Stop asking things for modeling and texturing ! We're a particle system for God Sake ! :D Le 29/03/2013 12:15, Simon Reeves a écrit : Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.com wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn’t let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each “stroke” should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it’s nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I’d sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform ( http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=fileid=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya’s artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I’d be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting…Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [ mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sebastien Sterling *Sent:* Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done. I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it’s a bit hit and miss. We’re not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don’t have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint – Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I’m not a Max user, so don’t ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive – something which softimage’s paint workflow is anything but. Matt *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Ahmidou Lyazidi *Sent:* Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. * Preserve UVs*: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. *Pain*t: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a
Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles?
I can see the attachment too! --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos 2013/3/29 Dan Yargici danyarg...@gmail.com I can see them (Gmail) DAN On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Stephen Blair stephenrbl...@gmail.comwrote: Hi Gray I don't see any attachments. This happened last time you posted a screenshot too. I couldn't find the attachments On 28/03/2013 6:46 PM, Grahame Fuller wrote: Do these compounds help? I've posted before but for some reason the attachments don't seem to make it into the archives. They were designed to copy particle instances to real topology, but obviously you don't actually need instances but just an integer for the object index in the group. Usage notes: To use, put Convert Instances to Mesh in an ICE tree on an empty mesh. It works only with the self object. You also need to store the shape index on the point cloud and reference it in the compound's ppg. To transfer attributes, attach one of the Transfer compounds to the Execute port - there's one for each component type. If you transfer the MaterialIDs, then you can use the Copy Materials checkbox. This works only if all objects in the group have identical Materials arrays. The transfer is based on finding locations on the group geometry, so it's best to move the instance masters apart if they overlap. It uses the 2013 version of Build Array from Set which supports topology-type attributes. To use it with Softimage v2012, you'll need to replace it with Build Array from Per Point Data. gray From: softimage-bounces@listproc.**autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com[mailto: softimage-bounces@**listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 06:30 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.**com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: ICE Topo Clone from group of objects onto Particles? Thanks but I need it as actual geometry using ice topology On Mar 28, 2013 6:09 PM, Daryl Dunlap twinsnakes...@gmail.com** mailto:twinsnakes...@gmail.com** wrote: Hey Eric, There's an example in the Docs for just that scenario. http://download.autodesk.com/**global/docs/softimage2013/en_** us/userguide/index.html?url=**files/ipart_instances_** UsingGroupsofMasterObjects.**htm,topicNumber=d30e291285http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/index.html?url=files/ipart_instances_UsingGroupsofMasterObjects.htm,topicNumber=d30e291285 On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 6:03 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com mailto:e**thivie...@gmail.com ethivie...@gmail.com wrote: Trying to clone a group of meshes and place them at particle positions from a cloud using ICE Topo. Is there a way to get any of the built in compounds to do this? Not seeing any compounds or sample scenes doing this. So to review I have 5 meshes in a group and a particle cloud. I want to randomly get a mesh out of the group and stick it where a particle is. --**-- Eric Thivierge http://www.ethivierge.com
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Thank you that was very informative :) What render do you recommend to have besides Mental Ray ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:35 PM Hey Christopher,I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its betaas well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. Icannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i havenot touched it since.Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first andforemost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat itssolution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs todo a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant forme, as an individual, was that animation was out of the questionunless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to waita long time for the frames to be rendered.Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in ananimation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnoldfrom this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turntakes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do notprecompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereasvray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choicesto "cheat" its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which inturn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershaderapproach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not uselight sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using aspecial shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked veryrealistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that timein terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, soyou could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things beforewaiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview orvray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature ofthe engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),which stored lighting information from all the light sources. Thatmeant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fixeverything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. Youcould dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, andeverything would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear nowthey have a nuke plugin for this.Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver.I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, andit had around 50 lights total.The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights onand off. Had it not been for this feature,i would have been rendering a week on the project.With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozenvariations in half an hour from the same render.Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration wasnot that good nor stable back then.Maybe now things have changed, but last i looked, it was pretty muchthe same workflow.Cheers,O Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:12 PM Hey Steven,No i have not directly.But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast. Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 2:44 PM What about Maxwell, which render has lots it's potential ? Christopher Sent from my Desktop ;-) Steven Caron Friday, March 29, 2013 2:19 PM you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 2:06 PM Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Well, i thought i made it pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is: vray. Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur, though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't recall if the offer was for xsi or maya. But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly. PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene this weekend. See if we can get any real data. Night,
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Sorry I didn't catch your answer even though you were screaming it, your reply could have been a documentary on renders I got lost in it :-) I've been testing 3Delight, from their demo, I like how it renders, but is there any hipcup when it converts Mental Ray shaders to Renderman, I was told converting can sometimes be a bad thing. Too bad there isn't some renderman nodes in Softimage :) This is a tough choice, redshift makes unbelievable rendered images, with the right knowledge you can turn out nice from Mental Ray just as well. I look forward to the test scenes. If keyshot is good at stills, and 3Delight is good at animation, does that make Vray a blend of the two ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 7:14 PM Well, i thought i made it pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is: vray.Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur, though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't recall if the offer was for xsi or maya. But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly. PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene this weekend. See if we can get any real data.Night, Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 6:41 PM Thank you that was very informative :) What render do you recommend to have besides Mental Ray ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:35 PM Hey Christopher,I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its betaas well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. Icannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i havenot touched it since.Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first andforemost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat itssolution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs todo a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant forme, as an individual, was that animation was out of the questionunless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to waita long time for the frames to be rendered.Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in ananimation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnoldfrom this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turntakes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do notprecompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereasvray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choicesto "cheat" its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which inturn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershaderapproach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not uselight sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using aspecial shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked veryrealistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that timein terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, soyou could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things beforewaiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview orvray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature ofthe engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),which stored lighting information from all the light sources. Thatmeant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fixeverything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. Youcould dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, andeverything would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear nowthey have a nuke plugin for this.Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver.I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, andit had around 50 lights total.The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights onand off. Had it not been for this feature,i would have been rendering a week on the project.With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozenvariations in half an hour from the same render.Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration wasnot that good
Re: Camera distance to an object
You then need a distance to plane calculation... the distance from the camera to null is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The angle of that line versus the z axis of the camera then gives you enough information to determine the distance to the camera plane the null is on. cos(theta)=a/h where you want the length of the adjacent side (a)... So the value you seek is cos(angle)*distance to null. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Yes it's working with the null centered. But what if I want the focus on some moving object that is not always in the center of the camera and coming near? It is like a follow focus rig. 2013/3/29 Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com Makes sense, thanks Tim! That means that the info from the Distance to Output Camera is doing exactly what you need Emilio, since when centered the ICETree info matches perfectly. -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Hey Ben, the farther offset the null is off center to the center of the camera view the more off the DOF would be because the DOF effect is sets in respect to the viewplane of the camera and it would take some Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Hypotenusehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotenuse) to get the desired major cathetus, which is the Distance between Camera Center and a Plane from the shorter cathetus. To avoid that, it愀 easier to constraint the camera to look at the null, then the hypothenuse snaps back into the longer cathetus and there is no offset anymore to worry about. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 10:06, Ben Davis wrote: It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. -- --
set raycast direction with a Null?
I have a null I'm using to raycast onto a mesh and it working pretty good, but I want to be able to adjust the direction by rotating the null and I can't seem to get this to work. There is a direction to rotation node, but there doesn't seem to be a rotation to direction node. Any help is appreciated.
RE: set raycast direction with a Null?
All you need to do is pluck an axis out of the transform and use that as your direction vector. You can do that with the matrix to 3D vector converters. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sam Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 6:55 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: set raycast direction with a Null? I have a null I'm using to raycast onto a mesh and it working pretty good, but I want to be able to adjust the direction by rotating the null and I can't seem to get this to work. There is a direction to rotation node, but there doesn't seem to be a rotation to direction node. Any help is appreciated.
Re: set raycast direction with a Null?
(opens personal toolbox) here you go m8... On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.net wrote: I have a null I’m using to raycast onto a mesh and it working pretty good, but I want to be able to adjust the direction by rotating the null and I can’t seem to get this to work. There is a direction to rotation node, but there doesn’t seem to be a rotation to direction node. Any help is appreciated. Vector from Arrow Direction.xsicompound Description: Binary data
Re: Camera distance to an object
Cool I will try that thanks a lot! 2013/3/29 Andy Moorer andymoo...@gmail.com You then need a distance to plane calculation... the distance from the camera to null is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The angle of that line versus the z axis of the camera then gives you enough information to determine the distance to the camera plane the null is on. cos(theta)=a/h where you want the length of the adjacent side (a)... So the value you seek is cos(angle)*distance to null. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.comwrote: Yes it's working with the null centered. But what if I want the focus on some moving object that is not always in the center of the camera and coming near? It is like a follow focus rig. 2013/3/29 Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com Makes sense, thanks Tim! That means that the info from the Distance to Output Camera is doing exactly what you need Emilio, since when centered the ICETree info matches perfectly. -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.dewrote: Hey Ben, the farther offset the null is off center to the center of the camera view the more off the DOF would be because the DOF effect is sets in respect to the viewplane of the camera and it would take some Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Hypotenusehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotenuse) to get the desired major cathetus, which is the Distance between Camera Center and a Plane from the shorter cathetus. To avoid that, it愀 easier to constraint the camera to look at the null, then the hypothenuse snaps back into the longer cathetus and there is no offset anymore to worry about. Cheers, tim On 29.03.2013 10:06, Ben Davis wrote: It looks like Distance to Output Camera from the viewport options is spitting out the info from a plane in front of the camera based on the distance from the null if it were in the center of your camera's view. If your null is centered, the values are the same from the ICETree and the viewport info. The ICE info from the Get Distance Between is exactly the distance from center to center (global.kine to global.kine). I don't see a problem with using the info from ICE to feed into your DOF, you're probably going to get a more precise focus placement (I'll accept being refuted by the photographers out there :) Hope that helps! Ben -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +33 6 88 48 54 50 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Hello I am trying to rig the camera DOF so I can attach the distance to a null. I am the ICE distance between node. But when I turn on the distance to output camera from the viewer, it gives me a different result. So the Distance to output camera from the viewport options is different than the Distance between node in the ICE tree using the kine.global.pos from the camera and the null. I will appreciate any help on this issue. -- -- --