Tim, You're hardly "just a freelancer". I believe you're inspiration and XSI guru. Well, to me at least. Every time, I wanted to show someone what ice is I directed them to your page as the first example.
I got hooked to XSI, after seeing this: http://typotrope.com/?p=300 A box I know, weird. I even reproduced it for myself. That in itself got me to convert from 3ds ever since then. What a journey. Thank you Tim for sharing your view and story. We need, studios and personalities such as yourself to speak out loud. Artur 2014-03-11 23:32 GMT+01:00 Emilio Hernandez <emi...@e-roja.com>: > Hello Vince. Thx a lot for jumping in to explain why you chose Softimage > as part of your arsenal to such a wonderful piece. > > And how wrong is Autodesk to end Softimage in such way when they have no > substitute for it in the tools they are offering. > > ------------------------------------------------------- > Emilio Hernández VFX & 3D animation. > > > 2014-03-11 16:22 GMT-06:00 Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsil...@googlemail.com > >: > > There seems to be this mis-conception that benefits to small freelancers >> are irrelevant to larger teams working on longer schedules and bigger >> volumes. >> >> Of course the priorities of a place doing feature animation differ from >> those of one producing MMOs, to those of a high end TVC boutique like the >> Mill, to those of the individual hopping between 5 members rock-bands doing >> 30 seconds skits. >> >> That said, there are good reasons, and considerable advantages, that are >> shared across fields. >> >> If you look at something like brick-blur in the LEGO movie (objects >> becoming a streak made of bricks representing large, real world volume >> pixel equivalents past a certain velocity threshold) of course we could >> have done it in another app. Parts of it towards the very end of it in fact >> are in-house. But you know what? In the end it's practically a full >> rendering engine that includes sampling options, bias adjustment and all, >> and it was all done in ICE until the brick replacement and injection stage >> that represents maybe 20% of the final effect. >> Could I have done it in Maya? Yeah, I could, but for the same amount of >> time I would have had a polished but really slow solution that would have >> had mandatory flipbooks, instead of a 60fps brixel rendering engine running >> in the viewport for animators to tweak in real time with controls >> indistinguishable from the rig's own controls. >> Could I have got it to run to 60fps in Maya? Again, probably yes, but I >> would have had to manually and painfully write, tweak and debug some fairly >> involved thread management, instead of being able to simply re-commit an >> ICE graph that transparently updated for animators, and focus instead on >> the creative challenges of nailing the effect. >> >> In the end ICE was preferred to both Houdini and custom solutions that we >> had plenty knowledge and fire power to deal with had the need arisen. These >> things add up, and they add up to the reason why Softimage has survived in >> the rare film shop so long despite the added challenges of adopting a non >> mainstream software. >> >> I've seen people genuinely surprised when they learnt that all the >> animals in Life of Pi were handled by three riggers and one supervisor. >> Normally that quality and amount of work would require more than double >> that crew if you look at most credit rolls. >> Well, Walking with dinosaurs was done with an average staff of 3.5 >> riggers and one supervisor for its duration, and it had close to 20 unique >> species and dozens and dozens of rigs once variations and ages are >> considered, with 10 unique hero characters, and that's for a department >> that also took care of a lot of conceptual work, creative iterations, >> simulations, and was later migrated to take care of character FX. I think >> by the end of the project the whole rigging department hadn't made it to >> the 100 hours of overtime mark, and that's several people over two years. >> >> What do those have in common? Neither used Maya for rigging (Pi was >> Voodoo, not Soft, just in case people don't know) :p >> Had we used Maya several hundred hours worth of RnD and asset triage >> would have been added to the bid, and the team would have probably have had >> to be close to twice the size. >> > >
