Hm - me getting it wrong is certainly a possibility.
But when I'm picking my memory about this, little bits and pieces seem to
bubble up.
There was this studio owner who had a DS, and he came by all excited, asking
me for a softimage 3D scene and corresponding render for testing. I was
surprised since they didn’t do 3D at their studio - he explained it was for
testing on the DS and I didn’t quite get what they were trying to do.
The 'clip on the timeline, done with softimage 3D' (under the hood) sure
sounds like what I have in mind.
It surely wasn’t a 3D import, I don’t recall seeing any wireframe - just
entering the path to the 3D scene and probably just horizontal and vertical
transform parameters. Probably the texture scaled at SD video resolution was
the source layer for the clip.
I'm not sure on version - but it was '98 or '99, certainly before v4 , and
quite possibly not a public release. I recall having a discussion about what
sense it made to do a correction on a system that was billed 4 times more
than a 3D station. If you had a correction, just send it to the people who
made the 3D. In any case, what were the odds of having a client requesting a
correction on shifting a texture a bit left or right on the 3D model, that
was already rendered and delivered? It would be a miracle for that one to
come up I thought.
I remember looking for buckets vs scanlines being rendered to confirm that
it was mental ray which didn’t do scanline to my knowledge - and remember
that it seemed very slow. I did 3D on sgi/irix and DS being on
win/intergraph, I expected rendering to be very fast on a PC. I was
constantly asking my studio to get me one.
Sounds like it might have happened - you tell me?
-----Original Message-----
From: Luc-Eric Rousseau
Sent: Saturday, August 29, 2015 3:21 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Friday Flashback #238
I remember opening a softimage 3D asset in the DS timeline, and changing
the
texture placement on it, and having it re-render, right there in the
editing
timeline, with mental ray - 15 years ago. It wasn’t all that useful, but
it
hinted of some very exciting future links between 3D and editing/comp.
Did you dream it? DS never really had that, they always dreamed of
having mental ray or importing 3D scenes.
In 1997 there was a pre-Sumatra demo shown around where you could
create a "3D" clip on the timeline and paint on it, that was built
using Softimage|3D. It never passed the prototype stage. At one
point a colleague put the dotXSI viewer as a plugin in DS and that
was a demo which AFAIK never shipped. You could do basic 3D with the
built-in "Marquee" tool in DS - a product Avid acquired - that's it.
All of these were OpenGL only.
That said, you were able to import Softimage|3D scenes in Eddie and
render them in there.
But then Avid drove a wedge between DS and XSI,
Avid wasn't smart enough to scheme like that and AFAIK didn't do any
such thing. Early on, we couldn't get anything done with the source
code constantly changing by another team with their own priorities
while we were trying to wind down and ship, so we branched out.
After XSI V1.0, it was very difficult to consider merging back because
it's emergencies after emergencies, and XSI wasn't made to run inside
other application so it took over a lot of things that DS has other
ideas for, and there were conflicting changes in both branches. Also
their code version was increasingly not portable back to unix,
something they don't care about. And it something would lead them to
their demise as they couldn't port anything to Mac where Avid wanted
to be.
And we disagreed on many things. For example, the DS team wanting to
control all the UI like the FCurve editor, but wanting to be focus on
non-animators, or controlling the architecture of operators to conform
it to their vision. So you're trying to make a 3D animation product,
but you have to negotiate with another team that wants you do to
things for them and their clients. You have to explain, justify and
negotiate everything. Same thing for the mixer UI or the rendertree,
they wanted to own that, but on their own terms.
The principles of DS is that DS provides everything as shared service
(ex: the FCurve editor, toolbars, menu, hotkey mapping, etc) and then
you can plug your mini-app in it as a plug-in, a clip on its timeline.
Only one such third party plugin was ever made, Toonz.
In retrospect it's DS that should have been built on XSI, not the
reverse - but DS shipped 2 years before XSI v1.0. Because 3D apps
have become frameworks, XSI is the one that's the superset, with
scripting, expressions, construction history, lots of viewport tools,
etc. But in DS team's mind, the NLE market was 100 times bigger and
the 3D market is shrinking, so it should be up to the 3D team to
follow, not the reverse. Different points of views!
In any case, nowadays it's kind of illogical to think of a Softimage
as a plugin for a video editing app. The 3D app is going to be bigger
and more ambitious in scope than an NLE app that's just got a
timeline/compositing/vectorpaint/video capture and text. And in fact,
as you know XSI almost has all of that without any help from DS.
