I wouldn't call myself a dinosaur, but I'm still here. I remember that SIGGRAPH. Nothing like having 10 mosquitos fly in your mouth when trying to drink your beer. I drove all the way from Chicago to attend it. Did the trip in 18 hours flat, nonstop, but for me it was the show where if it could go wrong, it did go wrong.
For example, Kim Aldis and I were invited by Maggie to show examples of using the XSI SDK in production for the Softimage SDK summit. Upon checking into my hotel the night before and plugging in my computer, I discovered all my addons had been corrupted and my original source code to those addons was on a CD back home leaving me nothing to show. I think Kim experienced something similar. The next day at the SDK summit after the Softimage SDK developers finished their lectures, MC Maggie told everybody in the room to gather around the table where Kim and I were sitting (this was all unscripted), then spent a few minutes hyping us up as the best XSI users worldwide to set the stage. Maggie then gave us the floor, but Kim and I both kind of shrugged our shoulders because neither of us had anything tangible to show. So we tried to turn it into an impromptu Q+A session, but it was a long 15 minutes of crickets. The misery didn't end there... I was also invited by Dave Lajoie to give a presentation how to write shaders at the Softimage mental ray summit. I was really intent on making a good showing as I had developed a suite of light shaders for 3rd party distribution I wanted to show off. But again, my addons containing all my shaders were corrupt and the source code was at home on a CD. I tried to explain to Dave, but he just cut me off and reassured me everything would be alright. He was thinking I was merely a little nervous from butterflies or whatever. Anyway, I lugged my desktop computer to the summit, hooked it up to the projector and had to figure out how to fill 20 minutes with nothing to show. As I look around the room I see Thomas Driemeyer, the head of development for mental images watching intently. Standing next to him is Marc Stevens and other important people from Softimage. So I can't do any fibbing to the pass the time, I needed to be accurate. Frantically searching my hard drive I found some old code for a light shader, but it was a really early version that I knew had many bugs. So on the spot I improvised by introducing the mental ray manuals, where to find information to write shaders, and specifically, how to understand the manuals as that was a complaint I often saw on the list (most people only read the softimage documentation which was often misleading). After a few minutes I saw disappointed faces in the crowd, so I took a deep breath, loaded my buggy code into visual studio, and started the demonstration. Before I could get too far, Dave crawls up on his hands and knees and informs me with a hand gesture I have 2 minutes remaining. So I quickly rushed through what I could of my light shader code and showed a few pre-rendered images of what it could do, then wrapped up. Ugh... There were many other mis-capades at that show, but I digress. Upon returning home from the show, I discovered XSI had a bug in the addon system. In early versions of XSI, all installed addons were stored in a single file, not separate files like they are today. Adding or removing an addon meant the application would add/remove the relevant data from the file. But in the specific case of deleting an addon, there was a bug where it introduced a byte offset error by deleting too much or too little information. All addons before the location of the error were fine, but all addons appearing after the error were corrupted as data would be offset or missing. If you ever deleted the first addon in the file, then you effectively corrupted all of them. The only remedy was to reinstall XSI. Matt Message: 2 Date: Fri, 11 May 2018 11:23:14 –0500 From: Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com Subject: Any Dinosaurs Still Lurking? To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Just curious? Now that I?m a resident in San Antonio, I was reminiscing about old SIGGRAPHs on the Riverwalk, and came to the realization that the Softimage mailing lists, for me at least, were my Facebook before there was official social media. San Antonio still owes me a camera! ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
