Re: Thread safety in Softimage
Thanks for responding Chris. Well, for most of the old school ones (apps) it'd be an impossible amount of work to make it truly pervasive, but to be honest given the domain of cheap-shot parallelism in apps like Soft or Maya just making thread safe (or offering mechanisms to find thread safe implementation boundaries) a small portion of some accessors and various update functions would be a huge leap forward. Documentation too. It's not a huge deal for the CUDA side of work since most of the time I one works in the interval between host2device copy and device2host copyback, the boundaries tend to be forced anyway, but the moment you don't have CUDA and Titan speed memory in the picture (anything that needs to run on a farm in example :) ), copying entire chunks of the geo data is rather wasteful, not to mention slow, and the lack of native facilities for pooling of any kind makes it hard to scale the threading meaningfully. Maya doesn't exactly do well across the board in those regards, but at least with openMP, and this is a few years ago now, they added a mainthread safe way to maintain a pool, and then slowly inched from there to sucking a fair bit less . In Soft I still haven't quite found a way to not have a crippling overhead. Even a simple addition ala openMP, just to have a live pool, a couple lock options, and basic wake-from-lazy to use raw references to geo would go a very long way. It'd be nice if you guys would consider at least that much in the roadmap, even if only as a use at your own risk and basic implementation. ICE is great and all, but it's not ALWAYS a viable option, and it tends to cut off a good chunk of libraries and facilities that simply don't play well in context. Supporting compilers younger than a decade (and this holds true for Maya too) would also be nice :) On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.com wrote: I have yet heard any update on this. And I believe this would involve a lot of work for many DCCs. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Texture editor Q: How to fit unwrapped UV set inside 0-1 range?
Got it thanks! It seems it was the Texture Projection/ICE Tree order that threw me off :) Nice tool - thanks for sharing! MB Den 23. juli 2013 kl. 15:35 skrev Vincent Ullmann vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com: so is there anything in particular I should pay attention to when creating or selecting the texture projection? Nothing to special i think. Just make sure that your Settings in the compound are right. This is sometimes a bit tricky with cluster-properties in ICE. Also it might be a issue if you create your ICE-Tree bevore applying the Texture projection Am 23.07.2013 15:07, schrieb Morten Bartholdy: Sorry for mailing you directly - my web mail client does that when using the reply button. Here it goes listwise: - Thanks Vincent I realize I did not have the version 2.0 of the compound with the normalize button - I got the version from rray.de/xsi which is apparently 1.0. Logged in to Google and got V 2.0 now :) Your demo scene works fine, but if I create a new object from scratch it seems the compound does not read the texture projection, showing red . I am sure this is just user error, so is there anything in particular I should pay attention to when creating or selecting the texture projection? Thanks - Morten Den 23. juli 2013 kl. 14:21 skrev Vincent Ullmann vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com mailto:vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com : 1) Create your Texture Projection 2) Create a ICE-Tree on your Object 3) Drop the Compound in 4) Conncect the exectute and the in-Port (se ScreenShot) 5) Check the Normalize-Button Am 23.07.2013 14:05, schrieb Morten Bartholdy: Thanks Vincent, That looks like what I need. Please forgive me - maybe my brain is working a bit slow here in the summerheat - how do I use it? MB Den 23. juli 2013 kl. 13:41 skrev Vincent Ullmann vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com mailto:vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com : You could try the compound i made some time ago: Link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/xsi_list/OHHmaiO2IVU/YVFXtYq1ZGUJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21msg/xsi_list/OHHmaiO2IVU/YVFXtYq1ZGUJ Link2: http://rray.de/xsi/ http://rray.de/xsi/ - Search for Scale UV Am 23.07.2013 13:06, schrieb Morten Bartholdy: I now and then run in to wanting to fit my unwrapped UV set inside the 0-1 UV space after doing the basic UV layout, but have yet to find an automatic way, so eyeballing and hands caling has been my method so far. Does someone here know - is there indeed a tool (in the Soft TE) that does this or should I just go on doing it by hand and eye...? Morten
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
It's interesting alright, especially for Newtek, but I have an enormously sensitive bullshit alert when it comes to their output,having started with lightwave in 1999 and had far too many years of utter disappointment. Hopefully it's doing something valuable and new. It's always good to have something different available, but I've been cried wolf to so many times by them I can't help but be cynical. It's a shame they are pre-selling it without a demo to try - Core style, and the teaser is pretty vague on what it's actually doing. I still bet it's underneath all the fast geom handling etc it pretty much providing a world-space shape offset. On 24 Jul 2013, at 04:40, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Sure, they have to prove themselves, doesn't mean what they're showing isn't interesting or is trivial. Just what's shown in the demo is something that, outside of some propietary solutions which are unlikely to be as polished, is not available to anyone. Just delivering a stable version of what they show and nothing else with a decent stability and at the right price point would be interesting enough to at least try the demo for. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.net wrote: From my experiences Newtek products never live up to the hype and sometimes never materialize even after selling licenses to customers. I gave up on anything Newtek has to offer long ago. From anyone else might get excited about something like this, but Newtek has failed to deliver on so many times I would be a fool to get sucked into their hype machine again. Did they ever add an undo to their Dope sheet editor? I fondly remember having to reload my last save whenever I would accidentally change or delete the wrong thing in the editor….
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
If nothing else it pushes the boundaries and get other 3d apps thinking about different ways of doing things. Personally I feel the main players have become a little stale when it comes to major leaps forward. For the moment the only fresh development ideas are coming from the 3rd party folks . e.g. Creation Engine etc. From: Bk p...@bustykelp.commailto:p...@bustykelp.com Reply-To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Date: Wednesday 24 July 2013 9:49 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: OT: ChronoSculpt It's interesting alright, especially for Newtek, but I have an enormously sensitive bullshit alert when it comes to their output,having started with lightwave in 1999 and had far too many years of utter disappointment. Hopefully it's doing something valuable and new. It's always good to have something different available, but I've been cried wolf to so many times by them I can't help but be cynical. It's a shame they are pre-selling it without a demo to try - Core style, and the teaser is pretty vague on what it's actually doing. I still bet it's underneath all the fast geom handling etc it pretty much providing a world-space shape offset. On 24 Jul 2013, at 04:40, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.commailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Sure, they have to prove themselves, doesn't mean what they're showing isn't interesting or is trivial. Just what's shown in the demo is something that, outside of some propietary solutions which are unlikely to be as polished, is not available to anyone. Just delivering a stable version of what they show and nothing else with a decent stability and at the right price point would be interesting enough to at least try the demo for. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.netmailto:sbowl...@cox.net wrote: From my experiences Newtek products never live up to the hype and sometimes never materialize even after selling licenses to customers. I gave up on anything Newtek has to offer long ago. From anyone else might get excited about something like this, but Newtek has failed to deliver on so many times I would be a fool to get sucked into their hype machine again. Did they ever add an undo to their Dope sheet editor? I fondly remember having to reload my last save whenever I would accidentally change or delete the wrong thing in the editor…. table width=100% border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 style=width:100%; tr td align=left style=text-align:justify;font face=arial,sans-serif size=1 color=#99span style=font-size:11px;This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. /span/font/td /tr /table
Re: Thread safety in Softimage
It's worth mentioning that Maya has been using Intel's Threading Building Blocks library internally in addition to OpenMP. Although it's not directly exposed through their API you could use the library directly to write threaded code. Unfortunately the vast majority of Maya API methods are still not thread-safe and thread safety is not documented. So yeah I would definitely second the need for improved threading support across both applications. P.S. at least Maya has finally moved away from VS v90 platform, now it's only a couple of years behind... On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Thanks for responding Chris. Well, for most of the old school ones (apps) it'd be an impossible amount of work to make it truly pervasive, but to be honest given the domain of cheap-shot parallelism in apps like Soft or Maya just making thread safe (or offering mechanisms to find thread safe implementation boundaries) a small portion of some accessors and various update functions would be a huge leap forward. Documentation too. It's not a huge deal for the CUDA side of work since most of the time I one works in the interval between host2device copy and device2host copyback, the boundaries tend to be forced anyway, but the moment you don't have CUDA and Titan speed memory in the picture (anything that needs to run on a farm in example :) ), copying entire chunks of the geo data is rather wasteful, not to mention slow, and the lack of native facilities for pooling of any kind makes it hard to scale the threading meaningfully. Maya doesn't exactly do well across the board in those regards, but at least with openMP, and this is a few years ago now, they added a mainthread safe way to maintain a pool, and then slowly inched from there to sucking a fair bit less . In Soft I still haven't quite found a way to not have a crippling overhead. Even a simple addition ala openMP, just to have a live pool, a couple lock options, and basic wake-from-lazy to use raw references to geo would go a very long way. It'd be nice if you guys would consider at least that much in the roadmap, even if only as a use at your own risk and basic implementation. ICE is great and all, but it's not ALWAYS a viable option, and it tends to cut off a good chunk of libraries and facilities that simply don't play well in context. Supporting compilers younger than a decade (and this holds true for Maya too) would also be nice :) On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.comwrote: I have yet heard any update on this. And I believe this would involve a lot of work for many DCCs. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation
Re: Thread safety in Softimage
Yeah, but I can't say I thought of that as much of a bonus since, if anything, for a while it meant you had to use TBB too to avoid some issues or a complete flattening of the threading, and the intel suit of tools isn't exactly cheap for home work :) My point for mentioning Maya though isn't that it's the shining beacon of progress, but that while limited it was available early enough (2008? 2009?) that at least you could have some implementation done without catastrophic results and start future proofing, and it was progressed from there to actually better than minimal over the following releases, to the point now it's enough to at least provide infrastructure if you decide to roll your own. It's also enough that if you're patient and adventurous you can sort of trick some allegedly non thread-safe parts of it to be usable, at least to the point of speeding up copies (IE: wake up rawP and rawN for a copy instead of having to copy once and then copy to device again). I'd expect it to be reasonable enough to go down the same path for Soft, starting from a minimum of safety for the main thread, and moving on to offering basic facilities (persistent pool and lock monitors) before it bothers with all the fancier things that, once you're safe, you can always patiently enough squeeze out of boost or C++11 threads (assuming the world wakes up to it). After all it's the kind of improvements normally facing users who'd understand the need and constraints of a slow trickle kind of implementation, it's not the kind of thing you have to do all or nothing before you can offer them. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Serguei Kalentchouk serguei.kalentch...@gmail.com wrote: It's worth mentioning that Maya has been using Intel's Threading Building Blocks library internally in addition to OpenMP. Although it's not directly exposed through their API you could use the library directly to write threaded code. Unfortunately the vast majority of Maya API methods are still not thread-safe and thread safety is not documented. So yeah I would definitely second the need for improved threading support across both applications. P.S. at least Maya has finally moved away from VS v90 platform, now it's only a couple of years behind... On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Thanks for responding Chris. Well, for most of the old school ones (apps) it'd be an impossible amount of work to make it truly pervasive, but to be honest given the domain of cheap-shot parallelism in apps like Soft or Maya just making thread safe (or offering mechanisms to find thread safe implementation boundaries) a small portion of some accessors and various update functions would be a huge leap forward. Documentation too. It's not a huge deal for the CUDA side of work since most of the time I one works in the interval between host2device copy and device2host copyback, the boundaries tend to be forced anyway, but the moment you don't have CUDA and Titan speed memory in the picture (anything that needs to run on a farm in example :) ), copying entire chunks of the geo data is rather wasteful, not to mention slow, and the lack of native facilities for pooling of any kind makes it hard to scale the threading meaningfully. Maya doesn't exactly do well across the board in those regards, but at least with openMP, and this is a few years ago now, they added a mainthread safe way to maintain a pool, and then slowly inched from there to sucking a fair bit less . In Soft I still haven't quite found a way to not have a crippling overhead. Even a simple addition ala openMP, just to have a live pool, a couple lock options, and basic wake-from-lazy to use raw references to geo would go a very long way. It'd be nice if you guys would consider at least that much in the roadmap, even if only as a use at your own risk and basic implementation. ICE is great and all, but it's not ALWAYS a viable option, and it tends to cut off a good chunk of libraries and facilities that simply don't play well in context. Supporting compilers younger than a decade (and this holds true for Maya too) would also be nice :) On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.comwrote: I have yet heard any update on this. And I believe this would involve a lot of work for many DCCs. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
Hadn't seen the pre-sale part. Well, that I too would be hugely skeptical about. I wouldn't trust NT with a bottle of milk, let alone hundreds of bucks of credit on a promise. Not after core and the 180. The software though has potential, and seems fresh enough. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Bk p...@bustykelp.com wrote: It's interesting alright, especially for Newtek, but I have an enormously sensitive bullshit alert when it comes to their output,having started with lightwave in 1999 and had far too many years of utter disappointment. Hopefully it's doing something valuable and new. It's always good to have something different available, but I've been cried wolf to so many times by them I can't help but be cynical. It's a shame they are pre-selling it without a demo to try - Core style, and the teaser is pretty vague on what it's actually doing. I still bet it's underneath all the fast geom handling etc it pretty much providing a world-space shape offset. On 24 Jul 2013, at 04:40, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Sure, they have to prove themselves, doesn't mean what they're showing isn't interesting or is trivial. Just what's shown in the demo is something that, outside of some propietary solutions which are unlikely to be as polished, is not available to anyone. Just delivering a stable version of what they show and nothing else with a decent stability and at the right price point would be interesting enough to at least try the demo for. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.net wrote: From my experiences Newtek products never live up to the hype and sometimes never materialize even after selling licenses to customers. I gave up on anything Newtek has to offer long ago. From anyone else might get excited about something like this, but Newtek has failed to deliver on so many times I would be a fool to get sucked into their hype machine again. Did they ever add an undo to their Dope sheet editor? I fondly remember having to reload my last save whenever I would accidentally change or delete the wrong thing in the editor…. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
Very interesting. I've definitely seen some of these ideas like sculpt over time done before with proprietary tools but nowhere as slick and effortless as it appears in the demo at least. I could definitely see this used in a CFX/Tech Anim pipeline with some success! On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:32 AM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Hadn't seen the pre-sale part. Well, that I too would be hugely skeptical about. I wouldn't trust NT with a bottle of milk, let alone hundreds of bucks of credit on a promise. Not after core and the 180. The software though has potential, and seems fresh enough. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Bk p...@bustykelp.com wrote: It's interesting alright, especially for Newtek, but I have an enormously sensitive bullshit alert when it comes to their output,having started with lightwave in 1999 and had far too many years of utter disappointment. Hopefully it's doing something valuable and new. It's always good to have something different available, but I've been cried wolf to so many times by them I can't help but be cynical. It's a shame they are pre-selling it without a demo to try - Core style, and the teaser is pretty vague on what it's actually doing. I still bet it's underneath all the fast geom handling etc it pretty much providing a world-space shape offset. On 24 Jul 2013, at 04:40, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Sure, they have to prove themselves, doesn't mean what they're showing isn't interesting or is trivial. Just what's shown in the demo is something that, outside of some propietary solutions which are unlikely to be as polished, is not available to anyone. Just delivering a stable version of what they show and nothing else with a decent stability and at the right price point would be interesting enough to at least try the demo for. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.net wrote: From my experiences Newtek products never live up to the hype and sometimes never materialize even after selling licenses to customers. I gave up on anything Newtek has to offer long ago. From anyone else might get excited about something like this, but Newtek has failed to deliver on so many times I would be a fool to get sucked into their hype machine again. Did they ever add an undo to their Dope sheet editor? I fondly remember having to reload my last save whenever I would accidentally change or delete the wrong thing in the editor…. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation
RE: OT: ChronoSculpt
i for one welcome our new(Tek) overlords bottom line, how many wasted hours have you spent trying to get simulation 'just right' this is a great toolset for that finishing, 3am tweak before delivery lets hope it performs like the canned demo, or that the Fabric guys copy (and improve on) the functionality and sell us a module ;o) a _ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Serguei Kalentchouk Sent: 24 July 2013 09:45 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: OT: ChronoSculpt Very interesting. I've definitely seen some of these ideas like sculpt over time done before with proprietary tools but nowhere as slick and effortless as it appears in the demo at least. I could definitely see this used in a CFX/Tech Anim pipeline with some success! On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:32 AM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Hadn't seen the pre-sale part. Well, that I too would be hugely skeptical about. I wouldn't trust NT with a bottle of milk, let alone hundreds of bucks of credit on a promise. Not after core and the 180. The software though has potential, and seems fresh enough. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Bk p...@bustykelp.com wrote: It's interesting alright, especially for Newtek, but I have an enormously sensitive bullshit alert when it comes to their output,having started with lightwave in 1999 and had far too many years of utter disappointment. Hopefully it's doing something valuable and new. It's always good to have something different available, but I've been cried wolf to so many times by them I can't help but be cynical. It's a shame they are pre-selling it without a demo to try - Core style, and the teaser is pretty vague on what it's actually doing. I still bet it's underneath all the fast geom handling etc it pretty much providing a world-space shape offset. On 24 Jul 2013, at 04:40, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Sure, they have to prove themselves, doesn't mean what they're showing isn't interesting or is trivial. Just what's shown in the demo is something that, outside of some propietary solutions which are unlikely to be as polished, is not available to anyone. Just delivering a stable version of what they show and nothing else with a decent stability and at the right price point would be interesting enough to at least try the demo for. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Sam sbowl...@cox.net wrote: From my experiences Newtek products never live up to the hype and sometimes never materialize even after selling licenses to customers. I gave up on anything Newtek has to offer long ago. From anyone else might get excited about something like this, but Newtek has failed to deliver on so many times I would be a fool to get sucked into their hype machine again. Did they ever add an undo to their Dope sheet editor? I fondly remember having to reload my last save whenever I would accidentally change or delete the wrong thing in the editor.. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation _ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3349 / Virus Database: 3204/6515 - Release Date: 07/23/13
Set Angular velocity
Hi List ! I was looking at Angular Velocity, is it possibleto set it ? (nothing wants to happen if I set it...) What I was thinking is something similar to goal (with velocity) with some damp effect. So the idea is : a particle has to reach a rotation angle, spins to get the correct angle Goes beyond and ty to stabilize around the goaled rotation angle. Exactly what Helge was doing with velocity in his early tutorials (Tutorials that should be append to the holly bible, if you ask me)
RE: Arnold Scene Viewer integrated in Softimage using Creation Platform
lictools still makes me smile. I'm curious -- what did FART stand for? gray From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:21 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Arnold Scene Viewer integrated in Softimage using Creation Platform I have heard comments of just stuff it in the ass, meant seriously, before. You have to admire Marcos for sticking to his guns with that file format :) AL also had Panes added to AnimShotSetup (referred to as ASS) frequently. I was saddened when our SS suite got renamed and acronyms like ASS and FARTs disappeared. On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Guillaume Laforge guillaume.laforge...@gmail.commailto:guillaume.laforge...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah I should add a parental advisory to this video :) On Jul 23, 2013 1:50 AM, Brent McPherson brent.mcpher...@autodesk.commailto:brent.mcpher...@autodesk.com wrote: Viewing tip. Make sure you are not taking a drink of your coffee around 03:15 when Guillaume starts talking about ass files! ;-) -- Brent 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 Guillaume Laforge Sent: 20 July 2013 04:00 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com; The Softimage-to-Arnold plugin Subject: Arnold Scene Viewer integrated in Softimage using Creation Platform Hi guys, As I think this tool developed at Hybride Technologies could get some interest from Softimage users, here is a teaser that I will show at the Fabric Engine user group this Siggraph: https://vimeo.com/70671257 Cheers, Guillaume Laforge RD engineer at Hybride Technologies -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! attachment: winmail.dat
Future of Naiad
According to a post on Max Underground, Naiad will be completely integrated into Maya: http://www.maxunderground.com/archives/19385_autodesk_siggraph_event_news___including_future_of_naiad.html No Max port planned, making it even more unlikely it will ever be integrated into ICE either :-( -- --- Stefan Kubicek --- keyvis digital imagery Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3 A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien Phone:+43/699/12614231 www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at -- This email and its attachments are -- --confidential and for the recipient only--
Re: Future of Naiad
they, you, need a better PR department. it is simple, don't give us reason to speculate so wildly. *written with my thumbs On Jul 24, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote: I'm saying nothing more, though if anyone wants to pvt me, then feel free.
Re: Future of Naiad
No PR department has, in history, ever been able to prevent a cluster of twats from speculating wildly and working themselves into nerd-rage. If one was ever invented it would have to be either an armed force with right to extreme prejudice in applying force, or an act of God, or possibly both. Mind, AD is often cryptic and confused in comm beyond what the usual within the quarter corporate rule would excuse, that we can all agree on, but no matter the amount of information that gets rolled out, people will always speculate and work things into re-inforcing whatever scenario they want to believe. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: they, you, need a better PR department. it is simple, don't give us reason to speculate so wildly. *written with my thumbs On Jul 24, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote: I'm saying nothing more, though if anyone wants to pvt me, then feel free. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Future of Naiad
agreed, the masses speculate. but what i was trying to say was stop with the 'cryptic and confused' communication... don't show up at an 'autodesk' usergroup meeting and only show one of your five softwares. if you are going to kill the others and put all the money into maya, just effing say so... that's right, corporate rules don't allow, rather you love our money and would hate to see us stop paying you subscription. s On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 5:40 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Mind, AD is often cryptic and confused in comm beyond what the usual within the quarter corporate rule would excuse, that we can all agree on, but no matter the amount of information that gets rolled out, people will always speculate and work things into re-inforcing whatever scenario they want to believe.
Re: Future of Naiad
Frankly ME AD needs new TOP down leadership It's so beyond broken that no matter how hard the people below them try to show them the light they refuse to look. They still think Flame is still a valid product.. Single threaded piece of poo IMO. I am so surprised they can still sell the product at all, especially for the outrageous prices. There are just a lot of people who have not realized yet that the emperor has no clothes. And Maya is the future of 3d ... A code base nearing or past its 15 year mark... Really? Sorry but I am just not a happy AD customer. Sent from my iPhone On Jul 24, 2013, at 7:19 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: they, you, need a better PR department. it is simple, don't give us reason to speculate so wildly. *written with my thumbs On Jul 24, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote: I'm saying nothing more, though if anyone wants to pvt me, then feel free.
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
Gotta say it looks like Sparta, at least at a glance. A worthy addition but manipulating pointclouds with additional offsets keyed over time is very much what sparta does, and it's free ATM give it a whirl :) Sent from my iPhone On Jul 23, 2013, at 13:44, Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, I keep a curious eye on Newtek as I started off on Lightwave 6 (no mocking, I don't have time to use it but I still like their product), and this really caught my attention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iskaa6krwzQ#at=87 More info on the website: https://www.lightwave3d.com/chronosculpt/ Anyone using it already? -- Ben Davis www.moondog-animation.com +1 (423) 313 9304
Re: OT: ChronoSculpt
I was under the impression Sparta only deals with a single point cloud element. No Alembic support, no scene description, no island recognition, no concept of normals affecting sculpts and so on. Has that changed? If not the difference is pretty significant. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Andy Moorer andymoo...@gmail.com wrote: Gotta say it looks like Sparta, at least at a glance. A worthy addition but manipulating pointclouds with additional offsets keyed over time is very much what sparta does, and it's free ATM give it a whirl :) Sent from my iPhone On Jul 23, 2013, at 13:44, Ben Davis benjamincliffordda...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, I keep a curious eye on Newtek as I started off on Lightwave 6 (no mocking, I don't have time to use it but I still like their product), and this really caught my attention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iskaa6krwzQ#at=87 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iskaa6krwzQ#at=87 More info on the website: https://www.lightwave3d.com/chronosculpt/ https://www.lightwave3d.com/chronosculpt/ Anyone using it already? -- *Ben Davis* http://www.moondog-animation.comwww.moondog-animation.com +1 (423) 313 9304 -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Future of Naiad
So they have a scarcely maintained aging PoS they are still managing to sell for gazillions as a high prestige product, and have insofar managed to distract the audience from the fact the emperor is freeballing it, and you'd go to the board asking for the management who's pulling that hat trick off to be replaced? :) They do feel increasingly dysfunctional in their communication and user base management, but so does nearly any large enough media oriented large house these days. Only the Foundry seems to be closer in touch with the top tiers of the VFX industry. It's very possible AD is simply more Adobe than Alias/Soft, and we just can't (nor should we be supposed to) be served by a company with that kind of mentality. All that said, Foundry is doing better than ok and they seem to care a lot for the VFX business at many levels, unlike AD as a larger entity (which you have to remember is NOT Soft or Alias), and pipelines are going atomic with OSS glue, so the days of Maya/Soft/MAX not being required across the whole pipe are upon us already. When you think about it already entire chunks of the pipe in the top end reflect that, and a lot of that is trickling down to the middle, and will soon enough trickle further down again. With Katana + PRMan + Alembic Surfacing and lighting is likely the next bit breaking off the AD continent, much like modelling did already with ZB + Topogun. If Fabric manages to wedge in with splice and slowly abstract things away from Maya and convert it from host to client of platform, that's another big chunk going. There is less every day in an A to B scenario I open Soft or Maya for really. Whether that'll be viable for the small user, given the small user needs the whole stretch of software for himself and doesn't get to divide the expense across departments only needing parts of it like the bigger pipes do, well, that remains to be seen. The monopoly feels less and less like it's going to stay every day though. If you're a small unit or work in a small shop, maybe it's time to stop thinking like they want you to, that you NEED the all in one, and start figuring out how you can re-engineer a staged process into your needs and workflow. I'm succeeding pretty well at home these days, better than I ever expected to. Even as an individual I'm finding the big-arse DCC apps are more and more expensive OGL and graph eval hosts than anything else. This was simply impossible five years ago, We could barely do it at the 300+ staff project scale, now... not so much. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote: Frankly ME AD needs new TOP down leadership It's so beyond broken that no matter how hard the people below them try to show them the light they refuse to look. They still think Flame is still a valid product.. Single threaded piece of poo IMO. I am so surprised they can still sell the product at all, especially for the outrageous prices. There are just a lot of people who have not realized yet that the emperor has no clothes. And Maya is the future of 3d ... A code base nearing or past its 15 year mark... Really? Sorry but I am just not a happy AD customer. Sent from my iPhone On Jul 24, 2013, at 7:19 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: they, you, need a better PR department. it is simple, don't give us reason to speculate so wildly. *written with my thumbs On Jul 24, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote: I'm saying nothing more, though if anyone wants to pvt me, then feel free. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Future of Naiad
Ha! Good point on the flame .. I still maintain the emperor has no clothes;) I am a complete believer in atomic software. I think it would allow for greater innovation in each key area. Zbrush proved that to me. I am looking for someone to step up to the plate In the areas of rigging and animation. I'm hoping the guys over at fabric engine might do something for us in that regard. I know much higher frame rates are possible at this point if all a program had to do was to spend it cycles on those two areas, it is absolutely ridiculous that people have to play blast there animations to view to see it at full frame rate IMO. There is no app that focuses squarely on that subject right now. There are countless modeling, painting programs. For myself and and Janimation I want us to move away from the single beast program mentality. I plan to keep soft the glue that keeps it all together for now and the foreseeable near future.. Right now I'm really enjoying learning Mari, I bought that for home because I really don't see any other competition in that area. Because it squarely focused on 3-D paint, it got so many things right. Granted it took till 2.0 before I thought it was good enough to jump on board. Now that I'm there I could not be happier. Clairese looks very interesting to me, it almost seems too good to be true. Arnold keeps me happy when I can use it, as we have a limited license pool for the time being. I love Nuke as well, but I don't know it well enough for my taste yet. Modo has me interested as well, curious how the foundry leverages its render engine. I tried it once and found clunky, but did not give it enough of a chance. I also want us to move to an Alembic pipeline ASAP ... That's the next big thing that I need to get pushed thru at the office. I'm just a bit grumpy on where we sit, I just wish things would've turned out differently. C'est la vie. Sent from someone using his thumbs , Siri, and a healthy dose of dyslexia ... On Jul 24, 2013, at 8:50 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: So they have a scarcely maintained aging PoS they are still managing to sell for gazillions as a high prestige product, and have insofar managed to distract the audience from the fact the emperor is freeballing it, and you'd go to the board asking for the management who's pulling that hat trick off to be replaced? :) They do feel increasingly dysfunctional in their communication and user base management, but so does nearly any large enough media oriented large house these days. Only the Foundry seems to be closer in touch with the top tiers of the VFX industry. It's very possible AD is simply more Adobe than Alias/Soft, and we just can't (nor should we be supposed to) be served by a company with that kind of mentality. All that said, Foundry is doing better than ok and they seem to care a lot for the VFX business at many levels, unlike AD as a larger entity (which you have to remember is NOT Soft or Alias), and pipelines are going atomic with OSS glue, so the days of Maya/Soft/MAX not being required across the whole pipe are upon us already. When you think about it already entire chunks of the pipe in the top end reflect that, and a lot of that is trickling down to the middle, and will soon enough trickle further down again. With Katana + PRMan + Alembic Surfacing and lighting is likely the next bit breaking off the AD continent, much like modelling did already with ZB + Topogun. If Fabric manages to wedge in with splice and slowly abstract things away from Maya and convert it from host to client of platform, that's another big chunk going. There is less every day in an A to B scenario I open Soft or Maya for really. Whether that'll be viable for the small user, given the small user needs the whole stretch of software for himself and doesn't get to divide the expense across departments only needing parts of it like the bigger pipes do, well, that remains to be seen. The monopoly feels less and less like it's going to stay every day though. If you're a small unit or work in a small shop, maybe it's time to stop thinking like they want you to, that you NEED the all in one, and start figuring out how you can re-engineer a staged process into your needs and workflow. I'm succeeding pretty well at home these days, better than I ever expected to. Even as an individual I'm finding the big-arse DCC apps are more and more expensive OGL and graph eval hosts than anything else. This was simply impossible five years ago, We could barely do it at the 300+ staff project scale, now... not so much. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote: Frankly ME AD needs new TOP down leadership It's so beyond broken that no matter how hard the people below them try to show them the light they refuse to look. They still think Flame is still a valid
Re: Future of Naiad
I'm not quite sure I can fault them for not having their own floor space. They were present at some partners', but Siggraph having shifted crowd and attitude a fair bit I'm not sure they would have got a ton of mileage out of their own, not to mention their big news came out months ago with the 2014 releases, and if they have nothing for this quarter they can't basically show anything else. I can see why a big user event and floor presence scattered at other stands would have been a better use of money for them. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.comwrote: Speculating from Siggraph not having attended the Autodesk user event knowing they would have nothing of interest to show me, it's apparent they will be discontinuing all DCCs and focusing their efforts selling their new product Autodesk Blender. Frankly i find the absence of Autodesk at the Siggraph floor either arrogant or just plain stupid. Very apparent from all the talks this year that no one is really taking Maya seriously for effects work aside from some bits of naiad. SideFx is taking charge in a big way and have some big stuff coming not including Houdini Engine. Sincerely, Your embedded Siggraph journalist On Jul 24, 2013 8:03 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote: Ha! Good point on the flame .. I still maintain the emperor has no clothes;) I am a complete believer in atomic software. I think it would allow for greater innovation in each key area. Zbrush proved that to me. I am looking for someone to step up to the plate In the areas of rigging and animation. I'm hoping the guys over at fabric engine might do something for us in that regard. I know much higher frame rates are possible at this point if all a program had to do was to spend it cycles on those two areas, it is absolutely ridiculous that people have to play blast there animations to view to see it at full frame rate IMO. There is no app that focuses squarely on that subject right now. There are countless modeling, painting programs. For myself and and Janimation I want us to move away from the single beast program mentality. I plan to keep soft the glue that keeps it all together for now and the foreseeable near future.. Right now I'm really enjoying learning Mari, I bought that for home because I really don't see any other competition in that area. Because it squarely focused on 3-D paint, it got so many things right. Granted it took till 2.0 before I thought it was good enough to jump on board. Now that I'm there I could not be happier. Clairese looks very interesting to me, it almost seems too good to be true. Arnold keeps me happy when I can use it, as we have a limited license pool for the time being. I love Nuke as well, but I don't know it well enough for my taste yet. Modo has me interested as well, curious how the foundry leverages its render engine. I tried it once and found clunky, but did not give it enough of a chance. I also want us to move to an Alembic pipeline ASAP ... That's the next big thing that I need to get pushed thru at the office. I'm just a bit grumpy on where we sit, I just wish things would've turned out differently. C'est la vie. Sent from someone using his thumbs , Siri, and a healthy dose of dyslexia ... On Jul 24, 2013, at 8:50 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: So they have a scarcely maintained aging PoS they are still managing to sell for gazillions as a high prestige product, and have insofar managed to distract the audience from the fact the emperor is freeballing it, and you'd go to the board asking for the management who's pulling that hat trick off to be replaced? :) They do feel increasingly dysfunctional in their communication and user base management, but so does nearly any large enough media oriented large house these days. Only the Foundry seems to be closer in touch with the top tiers of the VFX industry. It's very possible AD is simply more Adobe than Alias/Soft, and we just can't (nor should we be supposed to) be served by a company with that kind of mentality. All that said, Foundry is doing better than ok and they seem to care a lot for the VFX business at many levels, unlike AD as a larger entity (which you have to remember is NOT Soft or Alias), and pipelines are going atomic with OSS glue, so the days of Maya/Soft/MAX not being required across the whole pipe are upon us already. When you think about it already entire chunks of the pipe in the top end reflect that, and a lot of that is trickling down to the middle, and will soon enough trickle further down again. With Katana + PRMan + Alembic Surfacing and lighting is likely the next bit breaking off the AD continent, much like modelling did already with ZB + Topogun. If Fabric manages to wedge in with splice and slowly abstract things away from Maya and convert it from host to client of platform, that's another big chunk