Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for Arnold or vray renderman...
A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response. "Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at this stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this. We're glad you're enjoying Yeti! All the best, Colin" On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de> wrote: > Thanks for this in-depth answer! > > Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti, > one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from > another maya maling list and another because of the really nice > sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here: > > (Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI > > (Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/ > 994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4&view=1 > > > Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax) > hair-farm into Softimage > from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron. > That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome. > > http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/ > > For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those > beautiful shed projects > there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks > > http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating- > and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/ > > -- > > I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find > something > that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading > approach when > applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either > Maya/Max/Softimage. > > The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it > seems it´ll be > easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something > actually looking > good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might > find atractive > at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time > doodling. > > I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya. > > I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t > compensate that sad fact. > > Cheers, > > tim > > > > > > > > > On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote: > >> Hi Tim, >> >> I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in >> hair&fur of Softimage /2014SP2). >> >> A few tips about working with built-in hair: >> >> Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence >> dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands >> manually, which can be >> counter-productive and -intuitive. >> >> If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex >> colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and >> where you want certain features >> (transparency, density, kink & frizz) to change and over which >> distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and feet, >> as well as nose & eye lids. >> So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure >> your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you >> have in mind. >> >> Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly >> work but has a tendency to "blur" the transferred hair style, even if your >> source and target emitter >> topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce details >> in the fur that got lost. >> >> If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the >> emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot >> collide with its own emitter, so you >> have to duplicate the source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is, >> create more actual polygons) and use that as the collision object. That >> would still be acceptable, if it >> worked, which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that >> any collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent >> of what you have it collide with >> (itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I >> ran into for which I could not find a solution. Thankfully my fur was >> rather short and the character had a >> lot of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides some problems >> when bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation in my >> case). From what I can tell it looks >> like collision is always computed against a simplified collision sphere >> representation of the collision object, no matter what you set for >> collision accuracy and shape, deforming >> shape, etc. It just doesn't work, at least not for me. >> >> Sometimes, when saving and reloading a scene some hair strands (like 1 >> out of 1000) would suddenly stick in some random direction. I had the >> impression that it helps to always >> collapse the modeling stack before saving, at least it never occurred >> again in final stages of production when the fur description was final and >> not changed anymore. >> >> Next time I will surely look at Kristinka or Melena. AS for >> simulation...I believe there was a Strand Simulation framework with self >> collision introduced on softimage.tv some weeks >> ago that looked promising, I haven't heard of ne1 using it for hair so >> far, mayb someone else can comment on that? Would love to hear some ideas >> on this as well. >> >> Good luck, >> >> Stefan >> >> >> >> > Hi guys, >> >>> >>> what would be a convenient way to create,style and control hair >>> in Softimage, with lengths up to 10-12 inches and ideally >>> both a good collision model and dedicated styling tools? >>> >>> Which Softimage version would you suggest, e.g. 2014sp2? >>> >>> I´m a novice with hair and fur but would like to set up >>> a manageable sample/test that ideally works with Arnold >>> and Redshift. >>> >>> Is it possible to work generic or transfer results from, >>> say Yeti into Softimage? >>> >>> Would you recommend actually leaning towards Maya for such >>> a task, either going directly to Yeti or similar? >>> >>> I know those are fuzzy questions, I guess I´m actually looking >>> for a biased answer regarding any of the various hair plugin options >>> for any of the major three apps, e.g. max/maya/softimage. >>> >>> Sofar, I´ve found the following options: >>> >>> hairfarm, yeti, ornatrix, shave&haircut, maya hair, maya xgen "hair" in >>> 2014ext >>> and the cinema4d hair options (shadowmapped). >>> >>> Admittedly, that´s a lot of options and I find it difficult to bet >>> my time-investment onto any of them since I simply know bling about >>> pro´s or con´s. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> >>> tim >>> >> >> >>
