While home sick the past few days, I decided to do some minor house cleaning
and came across some interesting artifacts of the past. One of them being a
document Softimage released in winter 1996/1997 to placate the user base after
Alias|Wavefront announced "Project Maya". for context:
Back in 1994, Microsoft acquired Softimage and had Softimage|3D ported to
Windows NT while also bringing the cost of professional software down by
significant amounts (thousands of dollars). Worried they'd lose major
business, Silicon Graphics acquired Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies
and merged them to form Alias|Wavefront, and soon after announced "Project
Maya" to merge the best of the two companies offerings into a single product
and try to reclaim some of the market share that had been eroded from the rise
of Softimage as the 800 pound gorilla. Well, Project Maya was making quick
progress and went into beta not too long after the announcement, and they also
migrated many features into the existing Alias PowerAnimator such as completely
replacing the IK system and improving the polygon modeling toolset. Softimage
needed a response to indicate they intended to stay relevant as most of their
hype was focused around "Digital Studio" and integrating products to form an
end-to-end production environment, but not much was heard on the 3D front as
Softimage|3D was falling apart at the seams and had also shakey releases in
Softimage|3D 3.5 and Softimage|3D 3.7 which was worse by a large margin
(forcing the release of Softimage|3D 3.7 SP1 only a few months later to fix
more than 1,000 bugs). Rumblings and whispers were abound in the customer
base. So, to quiet the rumblings "The Road to Sumatra" was published to give
the user base reassurance that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Now that Sumatra (XSI) is retired and 18 years have passed, the question begs -
did we ever get to Sumatra? Was the road to Sumatra real? Is it still
relevant today?
(Pardon the misspellings as I quickly typed it up from paper copy without
proofreading).
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"The Road to Sumatra"
A Brief History
Softimage 3D has evolved over the past ten years consistently leading and
revolutionizing the 3D animation industry. An Intuitive user interface, an
advanced toolset, and a production-centric focus, makes Softimage invaluable
today for any serious animative production. Softimage 3D has revolutionized
the worlds of film, broadcast, and interactive content, moving animation from
the realm of the impossible to that of the believable - and transforming the
art and science of motion into a tool for artists.
The time has come to advance the principles introduced in Softimage 3D to the
next level...
- to put to use lessons learned over the years from animators in hard-core
production environments.
- to provide a toolset which takes the next significant step for the animation
industry, pioneering features which will bring us even closer to the goal of
complete artistic freedom, scalable to the needs of the artist.
- to architect a vision for the future so centered around production
requirements that it will evolve into a foundation for all aspects of digital
media creation.
Welcome to the future of 3D animation
Welcome to Sumatra.
Experience the Future.
Transcend from granular animation to thigh-level character control - from
animating one athlete's motion to orchestrating the complex actions of an
entire team. Go beyond the explicit definition of movements to the direction
of characters who react according to their environment. Move with ease between
ofthe worlds of 3D and 2D, preserving the workflow of each while taking full
advantage of the integrated suite of production tools.
softimage is architecting just such a vision. Based on a totally new
foundation, Sumatra changes the way animation itself is created, introducing a
workflow designed to lead a paradigm shift in the production of 3D animation.
with high levels of control over all the elements, and a focused toolset
optimized for use with high-end mass character animations, animators are free
to push the bounds of creativity to the utmost extent.
Linking closely with the Digital Studio architecture and toolsets, Sumatra
maximizes creative options by allowing powerful sharing of elements between 3D
and 2D environments. With Sumatra's advanced paint and rendering toolsets,
users have complete object surface control from the inside the Digital Studio
framework. In combination with this and other digital Studio toolsets, Sumatra
will evolve into a foundation for all aspects of digital media creation.
Enginuity
A new order of power and technological breakthrougs honed into usability.
tools balancing functionality and elegance enhance the creative potential of
the animator.
Sumatra is the code name for the new generation of Softimage 3D, with a legacy
of speed, integration, and productivity learned from over a decade of
experience in demanding production environments.
A completely cross-platform initiative, Sumatra will deliver a multi-threaded
solution on platforms ranging from workstation class NT and IRIX machines to
multi-processing servers. built from the ground up, Sumatra's powerful
object-oriented architecture is the foundation for a high-speed 3D graphics
authoring system, designed for the peformance and stability while preserving
functional consistency throughout.
Sumatra provides complete control over the system's performance, from the most
common tools to the depths of the architecture. A highly optimized operator
strcuture, combined with a powerful execuiion engine provides a strong base for
tool and plugin-ins all working together seamlessly and consistenly.
Interactivity at the system core guaarantees the fastest refresh for viewing
and rendering. You control the order in which elements are updating.
Dinosaur's tails taking too long to swing? Turn on automatic level of detail
switching. Optimized handling of object reslution and animation guarantees
that you can tune to real time.
In the Sumatra architecture, plug-in tools are trreated the same as teh native
toolset, and have complete control over all data and user interface parameters.
Third-party developers and production programmers alike have full acces to
geometry, animation, and render pipelines. The Sumatra API is fully compatible
with the existing Softimage SDK, retaining speed and granulatrity while adding
a higher level programming paradigm and unifying previously discrete toolkits.
An Integrated Solution
Sumatra integrates functionality at bot the intra-product and inter-product
levels, combining previously separate featurs such as mental ray and particles
into a unified 3D product. Sumatra also integrates with Digital Studio
toolsets, yielding a truly comprehensive, end-to-end production environment.
At the file system level, Sumatra and Digital Studio share a common content
management system, in which each can use the work produced by the other.
Shared tools and datatypes further unite the two systems.
Interfaces
for artist, the most powerful aspect of a user interace is how quickly it
becomes transparent.
The Sumatra user interface incorporates the principles of workflow that have
long been the hallmark of Softimage 3D, including 2-click access to all major
tools, work-centric design, and direct, modeless object manipulation.
Combining these principles with contextual and customizable menuing and an
innovative design, Sumatra hones the interace to the needs of the individual
user. relational control of all elements - objects, models, textures, anything
in the system - provide ultimate level of flexibility.
Sumatra provides intuitive new ways of working graphically with scene data,
simplifying the management of multiple-scene and amass character animations.
chagne one, two, or all charaters with just a few mouse clicks. change the
overall direction of a crowd in a blur. Not sure of the right camera angle?
Pan around during playback with complete run-time viewing control.
A collective network.
For creative teams the ability to collaborate efficiently across hardware and
data boundaries can make or break a project.
The future of 3D content will be oriented around multi-user, multi-layered
animation. common vision, access to production data, and project tracking are
fundamental to workgroup productivity.
Collective networking is about workgroup transparency. It's about one person a
character, while another renders the background, while still another works on
facial animation. Sumatra is a system built around tasks, and architected to
manage those tasks efficiently.
Animation
animators have been breathing life into large reptiles, milk bottles, and even
dancing gas pumps. The time has come to instill behaviors in characters, so
they can perform actions on their own. How wil you feel when your chacter
darts out of harm's way, or cracks a smile al by himself.
Sumatra provides a whole new level of scalable animation controol, to optimizae
work with keyframe, motion capture, or any other type of animation data.
Character control is easier than ever. users can work with any kind of
animation seamlessly because all animation data is treated the same. work
comfortably with motion capture or constraint animation - or use both on the
same character. Want another character to move the sme way? just click and
drag the animation.
With Sumatra, powerful new tools allow you to work with animation in a
completely non-linear fashion. this makes the orchestration of complex
movements among characters in a scene far easier. combine actions with
customzied transitions, and trigger charcter behaviors from events. Define
your own behaviors, and set a time limit for a character to perform. Sumatra
is robust in handling banks of overlapping actions and timelines. Scale and
move actions and events proportionately to one another before compositing the
whole onto a master timeline. The element of time is now an advantage, and not
a constraint.
Inside Sumatra, users can pre-set values for a localized system, and allow
universal dynamics to drive the animation across a given number of keyframes,
evaluating collisions, and generating animation on the fly. further maximize
workflow by using the fully integrated particle system - cast stones onto the
floor, and watch them bounce. Toss a piece of cloth onto a slippery table, and
watch it slide off. Native prototyping tools take the repetition out of
sceondary animation, freeing you to spend your time on your artistry.
Modeling
The future of modeling requires a combination of performance and geometric
independence.
With Sumatra, fast, interactive modeling tools let you forget about the
geometry, and focus on the creative pathway to production goals. the modeling
toolkit adapts equally well to ground-up model creation or to
resolution-targeted model manipulation. the sumatra modeler adds direct
surface manipulation techniques to the classical notions already present in
softimage 3D. Experience complete partity of tools between mesh and parametric
surfaces, thanks to powerful data-types incorporated as base classes in the
sumatra architecture.
With Sumatra, levels of both control and etail are completely in the hands of
the user. model a character's head with bezier spline control, the body with
cardinal control, and the legs with traditional NURBS feel. Blend the entire
character together with fully relational blended surfaces. Blend on blends and
animate the whole thing. Need a lower res model for game prototyping? move
freely between the worlds of parametric and polyon surfaces. powerful
user-time tools, and new methods of modeling combine to push geometry
manipulation to a whole new level.
Rendering
Reality occurs at the point where geometry, texture, perspective and atmosphere
become one.
Sumatra incorporates the next generation of the mentla ray renderer as a
completely integrated system. Textue, pain, and render your world in any way,
and in any order, you like. The superior photorealism of the next generation
of meantal ray, in combination with seamless integration and network render
control, guaarantee that your production will have the hlook you want in the
time you have.
A fully interactive render control lets you preview only what you really want
to see. Trace at break-neck speed, thanks to the optimized integration and
data handling. Directly paint the textures, shaders, and effects onto
surfaces, right in the context of the scene. change the lighting model -
realtime feedback allows you to see exactly what you are implementing.
When the time comes to crank out the result, sumatra provides a render fram
manager for parallel and distributed processing. With multiple hardware
platform compatbility, Sumatra enables you to assemble highly optmized and cost
effective solutions for the most demanding rendering tasks. Distribute what
you want, where you want it, and allow the tracer to determine how to get
maximum speed from each workstation.
The Path to Sumatra
The Sumatra effort is founded on the requirement of our users, and so we take
the first steps with our current architecture. Many sumatra-class tools will
first appear as Softimage plugin-ins on both windows NT and IRIX platforms,
providing next-generation prototyping, modeling animation, and rendering tools
for use today.
Conclusions
The sumatra project is a bold endeavor to produce a 3D product which will
provide not just a common-sense next step to the existing production paradigm,
but rather, revolutionzie the way 3D digital media is created and produced.
Preserving the crucial principles of workflow, and advanced animation control,
solftimage takes the next significant step toward complete creative freedom. A
platform-independent production solution, Sumatra is articistic freedom
propelling your ideas to the look their very best.
Sumatra is your next big reative rush.
