Re: What use is ICE really?
Control Flexibility Scalabity Ludovick William Michaud mobile: *214.632.6756* *www.linkedin.com/in/ludovickwmichaud http://www.linkedin.com/in/ludovickwmichaud* +Shading / Lighting / Compositing +CG Supervisor / Sr. Technical Director / Creative Director On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:41 PM, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote: RE: Jason's post and all the others. A HUGE factor in ICE's usefulness, especially to non-CS type like me, is the fact that most compounds are published so that they can be opened and freely edited. You learn a LOT by opening up other people's compounds. And it makes it possible to build on something that's almost-but-not-quite-what-you-need -- which you can't do with a plug-in.
Re: What use is ICE really?
Always there Jason. Always reading and watching :D
Re: Dealing with CAD files format
what was great about MoI is that it took even CAD models straight and we could modify the geometry like connect pieces and/or clean objects if they had issues. Also we could define the level of details at export. (Very useful when you know that the leapster model has well over 150 pieces - with lots of sub-divisions, sub-objects, etc... and you don't want to have to clean every objects in Softimage - or any mainstream 3D packages - ) I do remember Polytrans too, a great tool as well when it came down to the CAD models. But I switch to MoI at the time for lack of finding the license for Polytrans and I didn't regret not finding that license. Ludo Ludovick William Michaud mobile: *214.632.6756* *www.linkedin.com/in/ludovickwmichaud* +Shading / Lighting / Compositing +CG Supervisor / Sr. Technical Director / Creative Director On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com wrote: Deep exploration is great but we ended up having to use polytrans as well. MOI3D looks very interesting if it works well though, thanks Ludo. -=Eric On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com wrote: Also deep exploration supports bunch of formats and converts really nicely as well On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Byron Nash byronn...@gmail.com wrote: We deal with receiving CAD files and ended up having to buy a license of Polytrans. It works pretty well. Before that I tried Rhino demo and some other free options but always wasted tons of time with poor results. On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: Hi guys, Next week I shall receive a mecanical pieces generated with Solidworks. Because I'm dealing with an agency, they might won't be able to send an obj or fbx file. They propose various formats : Assemblage or Assembly (.asm) Part (.prt) Parasolid (.x_t) Iges (.igs) Step AP203 or AP214 (.stp) IFC 2x3 (.ifc) ACIS (.sat) STL (.stl) VRML (.wrl) Universal3D (.u3d) 3Dxml (.3dxml) Catia Graphics (.cgr) So my question is, what format should I ask and what software would you recomend to open and save it in a classic polymesh format ? (preferably free...) I have an old Deep Exploration, I was thinking giving it a try. But if someone has a cool winning format + software to advice... Thank you ! Olivier -- -=T=-
Re: Why did I pay support?? Why did I buy a suite ? I want my money back!
For those really wondering Microsoft bought Softimage in 1994 from Daniel Langlois for $130 mil Then Avid bought Softimage in 1998 from Microsoft for $285 mil Finally Autodesk bought Softimage in 2008 from Avid for $35 mil (the 3D part only) With that in mind. Microsoft primary goals where to bring the 3D platform to the windows world, they had a feeling this 3D thing was gonna be big and they wanted their share of the os platform. Also if they made the move smart by creating new toys such as DS that they could actually make a profit. With that said Microsoft never shipped Softimage XSI, AVID did. Goes to prove the point that Microsoft didn't really care about Softimage more than they cared about my above statement. Finally AVID, as many of you stated earlier in this thread and other thread, didn't have a freaking clue about 3D and what to do with it. They cared much more about DS than they cared about anything else. Trust me I was there when we created a suite in DS that was doing basic 3D. Such an interesting time. Of course that never saw the light of day. (thank to whatever gods out there). Autodesk, I believe, don't really care about which is which. They sell Maya more than any other 3D platform because it's where the money comes the most from and where they get the biggest marketing from (think all the making of out there, how many are max or Softimage compare to Maya?) Autodesk is following the simple marketing pattern of any products. Softimage, Max and Maya are simply smarties, mm. Just like those product its supply and demands. And I believe Sylvain is absolutely right, as long as they're will be plenty of people spending their hard earned money (just like you Greg) I don't believe it'll ever be a waste. They'll keep supporting it even if it means to have a team of 15 peoples developing on it (@Greg, I didn't know you had that many fingers on your hands). Eventually even if all three products failed in some weird way because Houdini, Modo and Blender took over. Like many of you claimed in other thread it's only 3% of their profits. At this point guys as many of you know all these three apps have their pros and cons. I know for a fact that Maya is probably the only software out there used as a container for software/TD developing solutions for it. At one of the last company I worked for, I have it for a fact that at least 10 major facilities only use Maya as a Container to write their own tools and most often then none the users barely use the tools offered with Maya. They have a better pyQt options for creating meshes or for animating. Max, well I have to say, I have seen in the past 3 years folks that can use a 3D app like I've never seen anyone do. They were FAST and FURIOUS. Why? because of all those plugins built for the app. Were the results better or worst, nah it's all based on the user who creates the asset or the explosion. To be honest though I still hated my time with Max, but I can say with certainty that I understand why it's still so widely used, especially in the game industry. Softimage, oh dear Softimage 2.66 Creative environment. My first time ever on an IRIX system. That purple and gray modeling module that opened up for the first time on my screen. Wow I still remember that day. Really though, in the end Softimage is between Max and Maya. Although Stronger than Maya by miles. Softimage is still closed compare to Houdini or Maya. See how complexed it used to be to share between apps until Autodesk came into the picture. But they offer the best solutions on so many levels (animation, mixer, passes, ICE, arguably polygonal modeling...) and to this day I still always want to find in other apps the simple deform by curve that Softimage has since almost day one. I remember teaching this class of veterans and this young lady spent 15 min trying to explain to me that they had to write a basic form of curve deform in Maya. I couldn't get it because I couldn't believe Maya (oh the powerful and all mighty Maya) didn't have such a feature. She wanted to know if such incredible feature could be written for Softimage. After figuring out what she was talking about and showing her the tool and it's incredible features she still wanted to know if I could write a curve deform tool in Softimage... My point to all this, each app have their strengths and weaknesses. A Uber app, I don't believe in that, you loose too much by doing so, think about the development cycles (I've lived the dev cycle of an app written from ground up for 3D, it's not pretty), think about how many of us will simply walk next door and start using Modo and Houdini or even just plain blender (great app btw, not trying to sound condescending here). It doesn't make sense in any marketing point of view. The why I believe after 5 years we still haven't heard anything concrete about a Uber app. Ok plenty of rumors, but nothing real or solid. What make sense is history, Max was the first 3D app based on a previous 3D
Re: Open source json camera I/O platform
+1 to Steve. I was wondering why not use Alembic. After using it from Maya to Houdini, to Nuke, back to Softimage then from Softimage to Maya and so forth. It's been the best one I've got to use so far. There's a few glitches that comes with the exocortex plug-ins but like Steve mention, I'd be one for writing a in-house custom one for Softimage. The ones that comes with Maya, Houdini and Nuke haven't failed me yet (knocking on wood) Also reading from EXR is very nice tool as well when you go from RenderMan or Vray to Nuke (I haven't had to figure this out from Arnold or Mental Ray). No need to carry an extra camera file. All the info is embedded into the file per frames and nuke reads it like it's camera data. Not much experience on this one. But frankly the few times I got to use that exr camera in Nuke I was very pleased with the fact that I didn't need a camera file. Now I'm sure there are other reasons for needing a more specific tools. But if you're looking to just transfer the camera data, I've personally given up on fbx a long time ago and learned to rely on Alembic as being the most cross platform solution available at the moment. Ludo Ludovick William Michaud mobile: *214.632.6756* *www.linkedin.com/in/ludovickwmichaud* +Shading / Lighting / Compositing +CG Supervisor / Sr. Technical Director / Creative Director On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: not that there isn't room for a lightweight and free plugin for camera IO with minimal dependencies but alembic's camera support is pretty good. is that not working for you? now that alembic has it's own python API you don't need to use exocortex plugin's. by using alembic you don't have to re-implement support for maya, nuke, houdini, etc. yes, i know building from source is a pain, but we should push them to make binaries available for various platforms. steven On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:09 PM, Gene Crucean emailgeneonthel...@gmail.com wrote: What do you guys think? Any interest in this? I know it's a simple thing but I'm sure a lot of you also write these tools at studios quite a bit too and could possibly be into something like this.
Re: Render Region Fail
I just got the same issue, Try and see if your region option include track selection. Turn it off and see if your region is back. I just had similar behavior happened to me a few days back. Hopefully it's as simple as that. Ludo Ludovick William Michaud mobile: *214.632.6756* *www.linkedin.com/in/ludovickwmichaud* +Shading / Lighting / Compositing +CG Supervisor / Sr. Technical Director / Creative Director On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: For some reason, my View B won't let me draw out a render region. At all. The cursor icon is correct, but clicking and dragging across the viewport does zilch. Selecting items works fine. The other 3 views are just fine. Is there some obscure visibility option Ive missed somewhere that prevents render regions from being drawn? Again, it's only in one viewport of the view manager (View B). -- *Tim Crowson **Lead CG Artist* *Magnetic Dreams, Inc. *2525 Lebanon Pike, Building C. Nashville, TN 37214 *Ph* 615.885.6801 | *Fax* 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com
