Hi guys,
my emaildatabase got fragmented between seperating machines, please allow for delayed responses. Thanks for the many ideas and insights shed on Melena and Kristinka as well as the thoughts and opinions on how to potentially best implement a system in Softimage. Personally, I identify at least two groups of users, the first one capable of going in and actively developing a working system, the second group benefiting from such developments rippling into either a (commercial) plug-in or even functionality that makes it into a vanilla installation. Often with some delay and a limited feature set but out-of-the-box functions none the less. Sort of the 2nd wave on the beach. As much as I´d like to perceive myself differently, I must say I am part of group two. I may be able to find good workflows and good combinations of tools but there´s limitations in how far I will be able to push beyond already existing tools. As such, for now, I am looking forward to giving yeti a run for it´s money and going for Maya as a common factor in bringing things together. This may be disapointing when seen from a Softimage fan boy perspective but I think it is obvious that being in wave two, I can not afford to limit myself in the choices between existing tools, as I already limited myself to those existing tools. Still, for Softimage, I would like to see a fully working system at some point. But that would include styling, dynamics, interactions, animation and transfer as well as actually beautifully endering using an elaborate shading and rendering model. That´s a lot asked for in an upgrade and I doubt this can get enough momentum due to it´s speciality, there´s other areas that might soak up all those ressources, like first of all revisiting the rendering situation across the whole programm, including creating, handling and rendering volumetrics. Or not to forget, the amount of effort it certainly takes to make "Send to" work flawlessly. "Send to" is a very good example of supporting wave two, even if it feels like it didn´t bring anything new, it actually creaked open some of the doors in the way. Caching is another thing that has brought a lot of benefits. Cheers, tim
