Re: OT: Epic going completely crazy
Well I read the terms and conditions.. From what I understand, apparently any linear content (image sequences, short films, etc) you produce doesn’t have any 5% royalty above $3000 USD per quarterly, so that’s an option. From: Byron Nash Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2015 09:26:53 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com What do you all think the viability is for learning something like UE4 and using that knowledge to earn income. I'm speaking mostly about opportunities other than working at a large game studio. What are the use cases in smaller markets or remote working situations?
Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0
Paul is on the alpha, but waiting until we have the viewport for the standalone (or the Softimage integration. We have already implemented a bunch of deformers, including delta mush: http://fabricengine.com/rigging-toolbox/ (although not yet in the DFG). It's all KL... On 11 March 2015 at 16:56, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: i suppose an interesting one to try would be delta mush, a few pwoplw came up with that by themselves. What ever happened to Pooby ? On 11 March 2015 at 02:00, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Created a new section to track demos people build in the test group: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ Hopefully there'll be a lot more in there soon :) On 10 March 2015 at 09:47, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Ah thanks. That's good to know. On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hey Leonard, You can set an environment variable that Canvas looks to for custom presets. You then make folders within it and can organize them that way. It's already very easy to organize the presets. Eric T. On 3/10/2015 9:36 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: This looks really great. Congratulations on getting it into beta. It would be interesting to know if those presets are first class citizens. Can the presets be loaded through the same panel as the built-in nodes. I assume that you could just put them in the same folders, but a system for managing, separating and versioning them would be cool. Also +1 for color coding. This seriously looks great guys!
Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0
I recall already being one working in fabric no? On 03/11/15 16:56, Sebastien Sterling wrote: i suppose an interesting one to try would be delta mush, a few pwoplw came up with that by themselves. What ever happened to Pooby ? On 11 March 2015 at 02:00, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Created a new section to track demos people build in the test group: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ Hopefully there'll be a lot more in there soon :) On 10 March 2015 at 09:47, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Ah thanks. That's good to know. On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hey Leonard, You can set an environment variable that Canvas looks to for custom presets. You then make folders within it and can organize them that way. It's already very easy to organize the presets. Eric T. On 3/10/2015 9:36 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: This looks really great. Congratulations on getting it into beta. It would be interesting to know if those presets are first class citizens. Can the presets be loaded through the same panel as the built-in nodes. I assume that you could just put them in the same folders, but a system for managing, separating and versioning them would be cool. Also +1 for color coding. This seriously looks great guys!
Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0
i suppose an interesting one to try would be delta mush, a few pwoplw came up with that by themselves. What ever happened to Pooby ? On 11 March 2015 at 02:00, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Created a new section to track demos people build in the test group: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ Hopefully there'll be a lot more in there soon :) On 10 March 2015 at 09:47, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Ah thanks. That's good to know. On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hey Leonard, You can set an environment variable that Canvas looks to for custom presets. You then make folders within it and can organize them that way. It's already very easy to organize the presets. Eric T. On 3/10/2015 9:36 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: This looks really great. Congratulations on getting it into beta. It would be interesting to know if those presets are first class citizens. Can the presets be loaded through the same panel as the built-in nodes. I assume that you could just put them in the same folders, but a system for managing, separating and versioning them would be cool. Also +1 for color coding. This seriously looks great guys!
Re: BSuite - BStudio -- BUF Software
On 03/09/15 12:42, Sebastien Sterling wrote: would really nee to lnow what it's like. i seem to remember Maguff having its on propitiatory software, which eventually got phased out for maya and renderman. Me too can't wait to see performance, usability ... and wonder about their renderer, (path tracing performance, etc..) .. if they will open-up to other renders, and how is their SDK (in general, or not to mention for eventual Fabric support) how the different modules work together.. Otherwise it would be "funny" if it turned out to be more awkward, unforgiving, or more "complicated" than the few (or essentially the one) other currently available high-end solution(s). But I would seriously doubt that, from what can be gathered to date, it should at least be considerably refined and straight forward, especially considering that it's very much like a born in production, production software. Along with what seems to be it's own "shotgun", among the other modules that seem to cover many or most production aspects while all being made to work together. Unless that perception was largely from "myth", which I'd hardly think so ... (imagine Soft without even "Avid", where it was perhaps less, but also like a stepchild, how it would have been treated.. represented cared for... and how that would have affected adoption/perception) Looks a bit like Houdini in terms of them remaining themselves, with all the way up to management being "into it" (except with perhaps more of a "hands-on production" side to them) I think the edge of Both Softimage (3D) and uptil now XSI, is that while being advanced, they were (arguably quite a bit more than others) made and refined (all the way down to little "silly" details) with everyday production in mind, simplifying procedures, and making things super sturdy in however unconventional way they are used. I don't know in the later years, but I recall how at least through special projects, how we were in constant back and forth between various shops, and with at least some product managers being somewhat "artsy" themselves. And I would hope (while being rather confident) this solution would also have such an edge, and wouldn't be surprised seeing it become the only other one, other than the only other (non-specialized) one. The only caveat I see to date, is the exclusive Linux/Mac support, which if it indeed turned out to be really great, I would go for booting in Linux, and Virtualboxing Windows for other secondary things. (and/or perhaps later-on, no Windows at all) (fingers crossed)
Re: OT: Epic going completely crazy
Nice to hear that Nicolas! let me know if you need beta test ;) F. 2015-03-11 10:35 GMT-03:00 Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com: They're not the only one working on it ;) ...so I guess there will be alembic stuff available in short time 2015-03-11 14:14 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com: Hi Nicolas, the kl 360 plugin is gonna be free via github, it would be nice if they publish the alembic one too :) F. 2015-03-11 10:01 GMT-03:00 Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com: I think they used a techinque similar to this http://www.kolor.com/livepano one, I also notice that they made a 360 viewer inside UE4, so I guess they combined that with 3d geometry inside UE4 and...well...its pretty amazing! 2015-03-11 13:34 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com: It seems this guys wrote an alembic plugin! sweet :) http://blog.kiteandlightning.la/ By the way, their last vr demo The Insurgent is pretty amazing, still wondering how they incorporated the live footage into the engine with that quality. F. 2015-03-09 10:35 GMT-03:00 Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com: I don't know about you guys, but for me the coolest thing would be, proper alembic support. I just want to use it as a render at first, so I don't care if the alembic reader is slow, as long as the render is nice and fast :) Building interactive content will come a bit later for me. G On 09/03/2015 07:18, Francisco Criado wrote: Well, this is interesting: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=3067Itemid=66 F. 2015-03-07 13:27 GMT-03:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Has any idea negotiated a custom deal? That seems to be the most obvious way to get a cap. Obviously, that would be subject to strict NDA's but it would be interesting to know at what level in terms of gross revenue people have been able to negotiate. On 7 March 2015 at 07:27, Eric Cosky e...@cosky.com wrote: As a game dev, I have some concerns about the royalties of Unreal. It's a fantastic engine that I enjoy very much, and it may very well be the right choice in many cases but I do wish they had a cap on the royalties. If nothing else, the royalties should be carefully considered against the alternatives. I wrote a post explaining my thoughts in more detail here http://bit.ly/1zAgU6P. It came out a few days before they cut the monthly fee, but as you will see in the post that cost really was just a drop in the bucket that doesn't change the big numbers. Of course, none of this applies if you aren't subject to royalties which is bound to be a good percentage of people in this list. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote: Some more comparisons.. http://blog.digitaltutors.com/whats-better-deal-unreal-engine-4-unity-5/ On 3 March 2015 at 21:49, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks everyone. So (just to be clear, because i don't think I was) I was trying to get vertex level animation (not morph targets) into UE4. So I want to rig and envelope a character (or object) in another app (like Soft or C4D) and animate it with bones. Then I want to cache the animation of the deforming mesh, and export that out to UE4 without the bones, just the animated mesh. I wanted to avoid FBX because, well, it is FBX and has been horribly varied and spotty with regards to stability and reliability over the years. Alembic is lighter weight, faster to load large caches, far more stable and reliable (although this is, of course, also partly dependent on the target application that hosts the importer). The only reason I mentioned morph targets is that many people that were users of UE4 had suggested that the way to get vertex level animation into UE4 was by using morph targets and doing one morph per frame manually. Seemed a bit stupid to do it by hand, to me. Am I being ridiculous to not just use FBX? Does FBX work well with vertex animation? If I was near my machine I would just try it myself, but I won't be for a while. Thanks again Perry On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Perry, you can import animated models and characters wih fbx, and you have two ways, with the animation embeded or importing animations separated and then aplying them in different ways. I had an issue with an animated rope through nulls like skeletons and didnt go to well, but i'm new to unreal too so there must be some way i don't know yet. Morph targets are quite simple, on unreal engine youtube channel there is a lot of info. Nicolas, what do you think? Hope it helps. F. On Monday, March 2, 2015, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: I have been using UE4 for a month or so as well, and really enjoy it. One note, as far as I can tell it does not yet support Alembic import, so getting character animation (or deforming geometry
Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0
I suppose, it would be awfully interesting to have a small standalone environment in which to test deformers and solvers independently of other apps, but that might start to look worryingly like a DCC :P all in good time ;) On 11 March 2015 at 20:58, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Paul is on the alpha, but waiting until we have the viewport for the standalone (or the Softimage integration. We have already implemented a bunch of deformers, including delta mush: http://fabricengine.com/rigging-toolbox/ (although not yet in the DFG). It's all KL... On 11 March 2015 at 16:56, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: i suppose an interesting one to try would be delta mush, a few pwoplw came up with that by themselves. What ever happened to Pooby ? On 11 March 2015 at 02:00, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Created a new section to track demos people build in the test group: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ Hopefully there'll be a lot more in there soon :) On 10 March 2015 at 09:47, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Ah thanks. That's good to know. On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hey Leonard, You can set an environment variable that Canvas looks to for custom presets. You then make folders within it and can organize them that way. It's already very easy to organize the presets. Eric T. On 3/10/2015 9:36 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: This looks really great. Congratulations on getting it into beta. It would be interesting to know if those presets are first class citizens. Can the presets be loaded through the same panel as the built-in nodes. I assume that you could just put them in the same folders, but a system for managing, separating and versioning them would be cool. Also +1 for color coding. This seriously looks great guys!
Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0
We have a standalone, it just doesn't have the viewport hooked in yet (but you can do all the data processing you like). The next alpha will have it. The standalone is for building specialised applications (viewers, playback tools etc). Canvas graphs move seamlessly between the Fabric standalone and other Spliced DCCs. It's pretty cool :) On 11 March 2015 at 19:56, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: I suppose, it would be awfully interesting to have a small standalone environment in which to test deformers and solvers independently of other apps, but that might start to look worryingly like a DCC :P all in good time ;) On 11 March 2015 at 20:58, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Paul is on the alpha, but waiting until we have the viewport for the standalone (or the Softimage integration. We have already implemented a bunch of deformers, including delta mush: http://fabricengine.com/rigging-toolbox/ (although not yet in the DFG). It's all KL... On 11 March 2015 at 16:56, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: i suppose an interesting one to try would be delta mush, a few pwoplw came up with that by themselves. What ever happened to Pooby ? On 11 March 2015 at 02:00, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Created a new section to track demos people build in the test group: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ http://fabricengine.com/canvas-user-demos/ Hopefully there'll be a lot more in there soon :) On 10 March 2015 at 09:47, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Ah thanks. That's good to know. On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote: Hey Leonard, You can set an environment variable that Canvas looks to for custom presets. You then make folders within it and can organize them that way. It's already very easy to organize the presets. Eric T. On 3/10/2015 9:36 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: This looks really great. Congratulations on getting it into beta. It would be interesting to know if those presets are first class citizens. Can the presets be loaded through the same panel as the built-in nodes. I assume that you could just put them in the same folders, but a system for managing, separating and versioning them would be cool. Also +1 for color coding. This seriously looks great guys!
Re: OT: Houdini cluster materials
Another thing to note, if you apply materials inside the objects subnets then the material applied on the object level has no effect. I am really just getting started with rendering but this was quite surprising coming from xsi ;) C On 11 March 2015 at 09:50, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Materials in houdini are essentially applied per polygon (primitives in houdini). Check the details view of a geometry that has a material, and the select the primitive icon. You will see each individual poly has got the material applied to it. By the way, the Details View panel is your best friend. If you are not using it, you are not using houdini very well ;) C On 10 March 2015 at 19:08, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: You will certainly use them a lot as you will have surely many streams of data (a bit like if you had in one single object multiple parallel operator stacks that you can blend/merge/dispose/etc… My take is to try to do things at object level due to easiness with for example transformations, material assignment, scene optimisation and LOD. For example, every component of a wheel of a car I separate and make objects and have a hierarchy, this allows me to do very quick low resolution objects out of big ones. Transformations are much faster and ultimately I can do clever camera based hiding and what not. Also given I use bundles a lot having objects is very convenient as I can do text searches that bring the objects to the bundles so it is a major win after a bit of a slow prep time of course. So I would say my best friend is “object merge” operator rather than merge. ;-) hope it helps jb On 10 Mar 2015, at 17:47, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: (see addendums in bold) On 03/10/15 13:32, Jason S wrote: On 03/10/15 12:15, Christopher Crouzet wrote: This is a core concept when you have to deal with such graphs—it is so essential that the `Merge` node is probably one of the most used nodes in Houdini. I can understand why, whether for optimization, *[or]* manageability purposes. Groups in Houdini share roughly the same purpose than clusters from Softimage. They are a core concept in Houdini as every node understand them. What you can do with clusters, you can do with groups, and much more out of the box. I can imagine, as core *[or as basic of a concept]* as in Soft I would assume. *[or so it would seem]* And thanks for the, I think important clarification.
Re: OT: Houdini cluster materials
Materials in houdini are essentially applied per polygon (primitives in houdini). Check the details view of a geometry that has a material, and the select the primitive icon. You will see each individual poly has got the material applied to it. By the way, the Details View panel is your best friend. If you are not using it, you are not using houdini very well ;) C On 10 March 2015 at 19:08, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: You will certainly use them a lot as you will have surely many streams of data (a bit like if you had in one single object multiple parallel operator stacks that you can blend/merge/dispose/etc… My take is to try to do things at object level due to easiness with for example transformations, material assignment, scene optimisation and LOD. For example, every component of a wheel of a car I separate and make objects and have a hierarchy, this allows me to do very quick low resolution objects out of big ones. Transformations are much faster and ultimately I can do clever camera based hiding and what not. Also given I use bundles a lot having objects is very convenient as I can do text searches that bring the objects to the bundles so it is a major win after a bit of a slow prep time of course. So I would say my best friend is “object merge” operator rather than merge. ;-) hope it helps jb On 10 Mar 2015, at 17:47, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: (see addendums in bold) On 03/10/15 13:32, Jason S wrote: On 03/10/15 12:15, Christopher Crouzet wrote: This is a core concept when you have to deal with such graphs—it is so essential that the `Merge` node is probably one of the most used nodes in Houdini. I can understand why, whether for optimization, *[or]* manageability purposes. Groups in Houdini share roughly the same purpose than clusters from Softimage. They are a core concept in Houdini as every node understand them. What you can do with clusters, you can do with groups, and much more out of the box. I can imagine, as core *[or as basic of a concept]* as in Soft I would assume. *[or so it would seem]* And thanks for the, I think important clarification.
Re: OT: Epic going completely crazy
Hi Nicolas, the kl 360 plugin is gonna be free via github, it would be nice if they publish the alembic one too :) F. 2015-03-11 10:01 GMT-03:00 Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com: I think they used a techinque similar to this http://www.kolor.com/livepano one, I also notice that they made a 360 viewer inside UE4, so I guess they combined that with 3d geometry inside UE4 and...well...its pretty amazing! 2015-03-11 13:34 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com: It seems this guys wrote an alembic plugin! sweet :) http://blog.kiteandlightning.la/ By the way, their last vr demo The Insurgent is pretty amazing, still wondering how they incorporated the live footage into the engine with that quality. F. 2015-03-09 10:35 GMT-03:00 Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com: I don't know about you guys, but for me the coolest thing would be, proper alembic support. I just want to use it as a render at first, so I don't care if the alembic reader is slow, as long as the render is nice and fast :) Building interactive content will come a bit later for me. G On 09/03/2015 07:18, Francisco Criado wrote: Well, this is interesting: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=3067Itemid=66 F. 2015-03-07 13:27 GMT-03:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Has any idea negotiated a custom deal? That seems to be the most obvious way to get a cap. Obviously, that would be subject to strict NDA's but it would be interesting to know at what level in terms of gross revenue people have been able to negotiate. On 7 March 2015 at 07:27, Eric Cosky e...@cosky.com wrote: As a game dev, I have some concerns about the royalties of Unreal. It's a fantastic engine that I enjoy very much, and it may very well be the right choice in many cases but I do wish they had a cap on the royalties. If nothing else, the royalties should be carefully considered against the alternatives. I wrote a post explaining my thoughts in more detail here http://bit.ly/1zAgU6P. It came out a few days before they cut the monthly fee, but as you will see in the post that cost really was just a drop in the bucket that doesn't change the big numbers. Of course, none of this applies if you aren't subject to royalties which is bound to be a good percentage of people in this list. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote: Some more comparisons.. http://blog.digitaltutors.com/whats-better-deal-unreal-engine-4-unity-5/ On 3 March 2015 at 21:49, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks everyone. So (just to be clear, because i don't think I was) I was trying to get vertex level animation (not morph targets) into UE4. So I want to rig and envelope a character (or object) in another app (like Soft or C4D) and animate it with bones. Then I want to cache the animation of the deforming mesh, and export that out to UE4 without the bones, just the animated mesh. I wanted to avoid FBX because, well, it is FBX and has been horribly varied and spotty with regards to stability and reliability over the years. Alembic is lighter weight, faster to load large caches, far more stable and reliable (although this is, of course, also partly dependent on the target application that hosts the importer). The only reason I mentioned morph targets is that many people that were users of UE4 had suggested that the way to get vertex level animation into UE4 was by using morph targets and doing one morph per frame manually. Seemed a bit stupid to do it by hand, to me. Am I being ridiculous to not just use FBX? Does FBX work well with vertex animation? If I was near my machine I would just try it myself, but I won't be for a while. Thanks again Perry On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Perry, you can import animated models and characters wih fbx, and you have two ways, with the animation embeded or importing animations separated and then aplying them in different ways. I had an issue with an animated rope through nulls like skeletons and didnt go to well, but i'm new to unreal too so there must be some way i don't know yet. Morph targets are quite simple, on unreal engine youtube channel there is a lot of info. Nicolas, what do you think? Hope it helps. F. On Monday, March 2, 2015, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: I have been using UE4 for a month or so as well, and really enjoy it. One note, as far as I can tell it does not yet support Alembic import, so getting character animation (or deforming geometry animation) into UE4 is either done via a skeleton (not as painful if the animated geo is a character I suppose), or a series of one-frame morph targets to get animated deforming geometry to work. I have been told this is the way to do it, but I have yet to attempt it as it sounds very painful. Anybody using it that can
Re: OT: Houdini cluster materials
The material SOP sets the ‘shop_materialpath’ attribute on primitives. This attribute has a higher priority than object level material assignment. Same with Softimage actually, a material assigned to a cluster is not overridden by it’s object material. Andy On Mar 11, 2015, at 12:33, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Another thing to note, if you apply materials inside the objects subnets then the material applied on the object level has no effect. I am really just getting started with rendering but this was quite surprising coming from xsi ;) C On 11 March 2015 at 09:50, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com mailto:cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Materials in houdini are essentially applied per polygon (primitives in houdini). Check the details view of a geometry that has a material, and the select the primitive icon. You will see each individual poly has got the material applied to it. By the way, the Details View panel is your best friend. If you are not using it, you are not using houdini very well ;) C On 10 March 2015 at 19:08, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com mailto:jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: You will certainly use them a lot as you will have surely many streams of data (a bit like if you had in one single object multiple parallel operator stacks that you can blend/merge/dispose/etc… My take is to try to do things at object level due to easiness with for example transformations, material assignment, scene optimisation and LOD. For example, every component of a wheel of a car I separate and make objects and have a hierarchy, this allows me to do very quick low resolution objects out of big ones. Transformations are much faster and ultimately I can do clever camera based hiding and what not. Also given I use bundles a lot having objects is very convenient as I can do text searches that bring the objects to the bundles so it is a major win after a bit of a slow prep time of course. So I would say my best friend is “object merge” operator rather than merge. ;-) hope it helps jb On 10 Mar 2015, at 17:47, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com mailto:jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: (see addendums in bold) On 03/10/15 13:32, Jason S wrote: On 03/10/15 12:15, Christopher Crouzet wrote: This is a core concept when you have to deal with such graphs—it is so essential that the `Merge` node is probably one of the most used nodes in Houdini. I can understand why, whether for optimization, [or] manageability purposes. Groups in Houdini share roughly the same purpose than clusters from Softimage. They are a core concept in Houdini as every node understand them. What you can do with clusters, you can do with groups, and much more out of the box. I can imagine, as core [or as basic of a concept] as in Soft I would assume. [or so it would seem] And thanks for the, I think important clarification.
Re: OT: Houdini cluster materials
And the drag and drop mechanism works on the OBJ level, therefore I try to minimise the amount of “cluster like” approaches and operate at Object level as much as I can. hope it helps jb On 11 Mar 2015, at 11:47, Andy Goehler lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com wrote: The material SOP sets the ‘shop_materialpath’ attribute on primitives. This attribute has a higher priority than object level material assignment. Same with Softimage actually, a material assigned to a cluster is not overridden by it’s object material. Andy On Mar 11, 2015, at 12:33, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com mailto:cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Another thing to note, if you apply materials inside the objects subnets then the material applied on the object level has no effect. I am really just getting started with rendering but this was quite surprising coming from xsi ;) C On 11 March 2015 at 09:50, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com mailto:cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Materials in houdini are essentially applied per polygon (primitives in houdini). Check the details view of a geometry that has a material, and the select the primitive icon. You will see each individual poly has got the material applied to it. By the way, the Details View panel is your best friend. If you are not using it, you are not using houdini very well ;) C On 10 March 2015 at 19:08, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com mailto:jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: You will certainly use them a lot as you will have surely many streams of data (a bit like if you had in one single object multiple parallel operator stacks that you can blend/merge/dispose/etc… My take is to try to do things at object level due to easiness with for example transformations, material assignment, scene optimisation and LOD. For example, every component of a wheel of a car I separate and make objects and have a hierarchy, this allows me to do very quick low resolution objects out of big ones. Transformations are much faster and ultimately I can do clever camera based hiding and what not. Also given I use bundles a lot having objects is very convenient as I can do text searches that bring the objects to the bundles so it is a major win after a bit of a slow prep time of course. So I would say my best friend is “object merge” operator rather than merge. ;-) hope it helps jb On 10 Mar 2015, at 17:47, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com mailto:jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: (see addendums in bold) On 03/10/15 13:32, Jason S wrote: On 03/10/15 12:15, Christopher Crouzet wrote: This is a core concept when you have to deal with such graphs—it is so essential that the `Merge` node is probably one of the most used nodes in Houdini. I can understand why, whether for optimization, [or] manageability purposes. Groups in Houdini share roughly the same purpose than clusters from Softimage. They are a core concept in Houdini as every node understand them. What you can do with clusters, you can do with groups, and much more out of the box. I can imagine, as core [or as basic of a concept] as in Soft I would assume. [or so it would seem] And thanks for the, I think important clarification.
Re: OT: Epic going completely crazy
It seems this guys wrote an alembic plugin! sweet :) http://blog.kiteandlightning.la/ By the way, their last vr demo The Insurgent is pretty amazing, still wondering how they incorporated the live footage into the engine with that quality. F. 2015-03-09 10:35 GMT-03:00 Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com: I don't know about you guys, but for me the coolest thing would be, proper alembic support. I just want to use it as a render at first, so I don't care if the alembic reader is slow, as long as the render is nice and fast :) Building interactive content will come a bit later for me. G On 09/03/2015 07:18, Francisco Criado wrote: Well, this is interesting: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=3067Itemid=66 F. 2015-03-07 13:27 GMT-03:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Has any idea negotiated a custom deal? That seems to be the most obvious way to get a cap. Obviously, that would be subject to strict NDA's but it would be interesting to know at what level in terms of gross revenue people have been able to negotiate. On 7 March 2015 at 07:27, Eric Cosky e...@cosky.com wrote: As a game dev, I have some concerns about the royalties of Unreal. It's a fantastic engine that I enjoy very much, and it may very well be the right choice in many cases but I do wish they had a cap on the royalties. If nothing else, the royalties should be carefully considered against the alternatives. I wrote a post explaining my thoughts in more detail here http://bit.ly/1zAgU6P. It came out a few days before they cut the monthly fee, but as you will see in the post that cost really was just a drop in the bucket that doesn't change the big numbers. Of course, none of this applies if you aren't subject to royalties which is bound to be a good percentage of people in this list. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote: Some more comparisons.. http://blog.digitaltutors.com/whats-better-deal-unreal-engine-4-unity-5/ On 3 March 2015 at 21:49, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks everyone. So (just to be clear, because i don't think I was) I was trying to get vertex level animation (not morph targets) into UE4. So I want to rig and envelope a character (or object) in another app (like Soft or C4D) and animate it with bones. Then I want to cache the animation of the deforming mesh, and export that out to UE4 without the bones, just the animated mesh. I wanted to avoid FBX because, well, it is FBX and has been horribly varied and spotty with regards to stability and reliability over the years. Alembic is lighter weight, faster to load large caches, far more stable and reliable (although this is, of course, also partly dependent on the target application that hosts the importer). The only reason I mentioned morph targets is that many people that were users of UE4 had suggested that the way to get vertex level animation into UE4 was by using morph targets and doing one morph per frame manually. Seemed a bit stupid to do it by hand, to me. Am I being ridiculous to not just use FBX? Does FBX work well with vertex animation? If I was near my machine I would just try it myself, but I won't be for a while. Thanks again Perry On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Perry, you can import animated models and characters wih fbx, and you have two ways, with the animation embeded or importing animations separated and then aplying them in different ways. I had an issue with an animated rope through nulls like skeletons and didnt go to well, but i'm new to unreal too so there must be some way i don't know yet. Morph targets are quite simple, on unreal engine youtube channel there is a lot of info. Nicolas, what do you think? Hope it helps. F. On Monday, March 2, 2015, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: I have been using UE4 for a month or so as well, and really enjoy it. One note, as far as I can tell it does not yet support Alembic import, so getting character animation (or deforming geometry animation) into UE4 is either done via a skeleton (not as painful if the animated geo is a character I suppose), or a series of one-frame morph targets to get animated deforming geometry to work. I have been told this is the way to do it, but I have yet to attempt it as it sounds very painful. Anybody using it that can verify that, or did I miss something? Thanks, Perry On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 3:13 PM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: HTML5 has been added recently, but consider that the engine is quite new and the iOS/Android stuff is not well flashed out right now...but still, looks awesome, just take a look at Infinity Blade and the Zen Garden demo ;) 2015-03-02 20:56 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com : Eugene, Unreal exports to Android, IOS, Linux and Windows.
Re: OT: Epic going completely crazy
What do you all think the viability is for learning something like UE4 and using that knowledge to earn income. I'm speaking mostly about opportunities other than working at a large game studio. What are the use cases in smaller markets or remote working situations? On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: They're not the only one working on it ;) ...so I guess there will be alembic stuff available in short time 2015-03-11 14:14 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com: Hi Nicolas, the kl 360 plugin is gonna be free via github, it would be nice if they publish the alembic one too :) F. 2015-03-11 10:01 GMT-03:00 Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com: I think they used a techinque similar to this http://www.kolor.com/livepano one, I also notice that they made a 360 viewer inside UE4, so I guess they combined that with 3d geometry inside UE4 and...well...its pretty amazing! 2015-03-11 13:34 GMT+01:00 Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com: It seems this guys wrote an alembic plugin! sweet :) http://blog.kiteandlightning.la/ By the way, their last vr demo The Insurgent is pretty amazing, still wondering how they incorporated the live footage into the engine with that quality. F. 2015-03-09 10:35 GMT-03:00 Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com: I don't know about you guys, but for me the coolest thing would be, proper alembic support. I just want to use it as a render at first, so I don't care if the alembic reader is slow, as long as the render is nice and fast :) Building interactive content will come a bit later for me. G On 09/03/2015 07:18, Francisco Criado wrote: Well, this is interesting: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=3067Itemid=66 F. 2015-03-07 13:27 GMT-03:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Has any idea negotiated a custom deal? That seems to be the most obvious way to get a cap. Obviously, that would be subject to strict NDA's but it would be interesting to know at what level in terms of gross revenue people have been able to negotiate. On 7 March 2015 at 07:27, Eric Cosky e...@cosky.com wrote: As a game dev, I have some concerns about the royalties of Unreal. It's a fantastic engine that I enjoy very much, and it may very well be the right choice in many cases but I do wish they had a cap on the royalties. If nothing else, the royalties should be carefully considered against the alternatives. I wrote a post explaining my thoughts in more detail here http://bit.ly/1zAgU6P. It came out a few days before they cut the monthly fee, but as you will see in the post that cost really was just a drop in the bucket that doesn't change the big numbers. Of course, none of this applies if you aren't subject to royalties which is bound to be a good percentage of people in this list. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote: Some more comparisons.. http://blog.digitaltutors.com/whats-better-deal-unreal-engine-4-unity-5/ On 3 March 2015 at 21:49, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks everyone. So (just to be clear, because i don't think I was) I was trying to get vertex level animation (not morph targets) into UE4. So I want to rig and envelope a character (or object) in another app (like Soft or C4D) and animate it with bones. Then I want to cache the animation of the deforming mesh, and export that out to UE4 without the bones, just the animated mesh. I wanted to avoid FBX because, well, it is FBX and has been horribly varied and spotty with regards to stability and reliability over the years. Alembic is lighter weight, faster to load large caches, far more stable and reliable (although this is, of course, also partly dependent on the target application that hosts the importer). The only reason I mentioned morph targets is that many people that were users of UE4 had suggested that the way to get vertex level animation into UE4 was by using morph targets and doing one morph per frame manually. Seemed a bit stupid to do it by hand, to me. Am I being ridiculous to not just use FBX? Does FBX work well with vertex animation? If I was near my machine I would just try it myself, but I won't be for a while. Thanks again Perry On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Perry, you can import animated models and characters wih fbx, and you have two ways, with the animation embeded or importing animations separated and then aplying them in different ways. I had an issue with an animated rope through nulls like skeletons and didnt go to well, but i'm new to unreal too so there must be some way i don't know yet. Morph targets are quite simple, on unreal engine youtube channel there is a lot of info. Nicolas, what do you think? Hope it helps. F. On Monday, March 2, 2015, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.com wrote:
Re: BSuite - BStudio -- BUF Software
I wonder if the UI is still an identical clone to the old Soft|3D and whether they added polygons or not :) The original B-Studio was bastardized BPatches only and it was heavily targeted towards photogrammetry and tracking. On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: On 03/09/15 12:42, Sebastien Sterling wrote: would really nee to lnow what it's like. i seem to remember Maguff having its on propitiatory software, which eventually got phased out for maya and renderman. Me too can't wait to see performance, usability ... and wonder about their renderer, (path tracing performance, etc..) .. if they will open-up to other renders, and how is their SDK (in general, or not to mention for eventual Fabric support) how the different modules work together.. Otherwise it would be funny if it turned out to be more awkward, unforgiving, or more complicated than the few (or essentially the *one*) other currently available high-end solution(s). But I would seriously doubt that, from what can be gathered to date, it should at least be considerably refined and straight forward, especially considering that it's very much like a born in production, production software. Along with what seems to be it's own shotgun, among the other modules that seem to cover many or most production aspects while all being made to work together. Unless that perception was largely from myth, which I'd hardly think so ... (imagine Soft without even Avid, where it was perhaps less, but also like a stepchild, how it would have been treated.. represented cared for... and how that would have affected adoption/perception) Looks a bit like Houdini in terms of them remaining themselves, with all the way up to management being into it (except with perhaps more of a hands-on production side to them) I think the edge of Both Softimage (3D) and uptil now XSI, is that while being advanced, they were (arguably quite a bit more than others) made and refined (all the way down to little silly details) with everyday production in mind, simplifying procedures, and making things super sturdy in however unconventional way they are used. I don't know in the later years, but I recall how at least through special projects, how we were in constant back and forth between various shops, and with at least some product managers being somewhat artsy themselves. And I would hope (while being rather confident) this solution would also have such an edge, and wouldn't be surprised seeing it become the only other one, other than the only other (non-specialized) one. The only caveat I see to date, is the exclusive Linux/Mac support, which if it indeed turned out to be really great, I would go for booting in Linux, and Virtualboxing Windows for other secondary things. (and/or perhaps later-on, no Windows at all) (fingers crossed) -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
