Softimage 2012
Thomas Helzle
Jason Brynford-Jones
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/marks/introducing_softimage_2012_with_ice_modeling
Oh for you TDs check out what's new in the SDK :-)
Chin
Stefan Kubicek
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek Co-founder
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
1050 Vienna Wehrgasse 9 Austria
Phone: +43/699/12614231
--- www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at ---
-- This email and its attachments are
--confidential and for the recipient only--
john clausing
gold support?
ideas?
From: Jason Brynford-Jones <Jason.Bryn...@autodesk.com>
To: "soft...@listproc.autodesk.com" <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Sent: Tue, March 1, 2011 9:48:33 AM
Subject: RE: Softimage 2012
Sebastian Kowalski
Area Server is too busy at the moment, try to reload in 10 sec. Thank you for your patience.
Piotrek Marczak
W dniu 2011-03-01 15:57, Sebastian Kowalski pisze:
Dan Yargici
Eugen Sares
> http://area.autodesk.com/softimage2012
>
> ICE Modeling - yesssss :-)
Yesssssssssssss!!!!
Picky as we are:
how about Cluster access in Custom (ICE) Ops?
Best,
Eugen
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas
Tim Crowson
Now, considering a modeling stack method versus an ICE Tree... Since we sometimes need to freeze modeling to optimize our performance, would an ICE Tree that does the same series of operations slow down performance by the same amount? Obviously, the gains from editing geo procedurally would be worth it, but I'm just wondering how the ICE tree would affect memory, file size, and performance, as compared to a regular non-procedural modeling stack.
-Tim Crowson
Magnetic Dreams
James Brad Barnette [3Dmotif]
If ur on maintenance it will be free if not I would imagine that would depend on what version you are upgrading from. But usually after a big release, they will offer a “get current” special where you can upgrade from any previous version to the current one for a pretty good discount.
Stefan Kubicek
I almost fainted. The whole SDK update looks very solid actually. Looks like there's so excuse for me not upgrading this time around.
Steffen Dünner
--
PGP-ID(RSA): 0xCCE2E989 / 0xE045734C CCE2E989
Fingerprint: 394B 3DA9 9A9A 96C6 3A5A 0595 EF92 EE1F
Alan Fregtman
Alan Fregtman
Thomas Helzle
Blowing up dogs looks like fun ;-)
If all this holds together and actually works in reality, it could
become the most interesting version since the introduction of ICE in
version 7.
A working and solid release would do some good for my continued
interest in paying subscription...
Cheers!
Thomas
On 1 March 2011 16:36, James Brad Barnette [3Dmotif]
<si_...@3dmotif.com> wrote:
> If ur on maintenance it will be free if not I would imagine that would
> depend on what version you are upgrading from. But usually after a big
> release, they will offer a �get current� special where you can upgrade from
Ilija Brunck
Paul Griswold
Great Videos Mark!
Blowing up dogs looks like fun ;-)
If all this holds together and actually works in reality, it could
become the most interesting version since the introduction of ICE in
version 7.
A working and solid release would do some good for my continued
interest in paying subscription...
Cheers!
Thomas
On 1 March 2011 16:36, James Brad Barnette [3Dmotif]
<si_...@3dmotif.com> wrote:
> If ur on maintenance it will be free if not I would imagine that would
> depend on what version you are upgrading from. But usually after a big
> release, they will offer a “get current” special where you can upgrade from
Sebastian Kowalski
Christopher Tedin
Jules Stevenson
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Christopher Tedin <cte...@comcast.net> wrote:
> Picking up my jaw right now! I can comfortably forget about Houdini now (not
> that I ever really got into it in the first place). So happy, so happy! I
> can't wait to see what you geniuses come up with in the next few months!
> (I'm not being at all sarcastic either. You guys always inspire and delight
> me.)
>
Jean-Philippe Delisle
Matt Morris
Wooohooo!I don't care about anything else... but the rest sounds good too ;)
--
www.matinai.com
Vincent Fortin
Halim Negadi
As far as I remember Helge you did the very first one (2003?), it's up to you to keep on going :)
Matt Morris
Halim Negadi
Christopher Tedin
Marc-Andre Carbonneau
I can’t believe you’re actually on your computer, on the Softimage mailing list just hours after.
I’ll tell your kid when she’s old enough to understand how shamefull! LOL!
Take care dude
Piotrek Marczak
W dniu 2011-03-01 18:40, Christopher Tedin pisze:
Christopher Tedin
Len Krenzler
-- _________________________________________________ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca
Andy Moorer
Meng-Yang Lu
-Lu
Marc-Andre Carbonneau
I’m really happy about Syflex. So does it mean it is finally multi-threaded?!!!
Lu, is there a sneak peak of Maya 2012 posted too?
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
[mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang
Lu
Sent: 1 mars 2011 13:39
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
Be honest, Andy. Did you
look at the Maya features and snicker?
-Lu
Serguei Kalentchouk
http://area.autodesk.com/maya2012
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Marc-Andre Carbonneau
<marc-andre...@ubisoft.com> wrote:
> I�m really happy about Syflex. So does it mean it is finally
> multi-threaded?!!!
>
>
>
> Lu, is there a sneak peak of Maya 2012 posted too?
>
>
>
>
>
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang Lu
> Sent: 1 mars 2011 13:39
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
>
>
>
> Be honest, Andy.� Did you look at the Maya features and snicker?
>
> -Lu
>
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Andy Moorer <andym...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It looks like a very promising release. Very excited about the ICE
> additions, they included a number of the critically needed items for VFX
> work (subframes!) and ICE moving into the realm of procedural modeling is
> huge, there will be thousands of uses for the new ops. As a fan of syflex
> I'm really glad to see it's life extended via ICE support, and the SDK and
> workflow improvements are welcome.
>
>
>
> I think it's notable that this new version clearly has it's eye firmly on
> production... everything here is actually useful, not just crowd-pleasing.
> And right on the heels of "2011.5", too.
>
>
>
> Fast dev, targeted dev. w00t.
>
>
>
> Nice job, Softimage team!
>
>
--
Technical Director @ Digital Domain
Eric Thivierge
--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com
Alan Fregtman
darn fast! ;)
My favourite new Syflex thing though... is the curves! With ICE Syflex
you can simulate curves as ropes pretty well, and it's low-level
enough you can use it for other things like strand dynamics.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Marc-Andre Carbonneau
<marc-andre...@ubisoft.com> wrote:
> I�m really happy about Syflex. So does it mean it is finally
> multi-threaded?!!!
>
>
>
> Lu, is there a sneak peak of Maya 2012 posted too?
>
>
>
>
>
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang Lu
> Sent: 1 mars 2011 13:39
>
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
>
>
>
> Be honest, Andy.� Did you look at the Maya features and snicker?
Nic Sievers
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/cory/maya-1
Maya 2012 feature videos:
http://area.autodesk.com/maya2012
> I’m really happy about Syflex. So does it mean it is finally
> multi-threaded?!!!
>
>
>
> Lu, is there a sneak peak of Maya 2012 posted too?
>
>
>
>
>
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang Lu
> Sent: 1 mars 2011 13:39
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
>
>
>
> Be honest, Andy. Did you look at the Maya features and snicker?
>
> -Lu
>
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Andy Moorer <andym...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It looks like a very promising release. Very excited about the ICE
> additions, they included a number of the critically needed items for VFX
> work (subframes!) and ICE moving into the realm of procedural modeling is
> huge, there will be thousands of uses for the new ops. As a fan of syflex
> I'm really glad to see it's life extended via ICE support, and the SDK and
> workflow improvements are welcome.
>
>
>
> I think it's notable that this new version clearly has it's eye firmly on
> production... everything here is actually useful, not just crowd-pleasing.
> And right on the heels of "2011.5", too.
>
>
>
> Fast dev, targeted dev. w00t.
>
>
>
> Nice job, Softimage team!
>
>
Meng-Yang Lu
I have to welcome updates anyway since my choice of software is largely up to who's comfortable with what when the job kicks off. My only gripe is that I don't welcome tools that don't contribute hugely to productivity and end up bloating the software.
With that said, great job on the updates for Softimage. Simply revisiting the old stuff and making that better really makes me feel warm inside.
-Lu
Alan Fregtman
Steven Caron
s
Christopher Tedin
Eric Thivierge
--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com
Byron Nash
john clausing
From: Byron Nash <byro...@gmail.com>
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Sent: Tue, March 1, 2011 3:27:21 PM
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
Williams, Wayne
During the Apocalypse. But no worries dood, ICE got that under control ;-)
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com]
On Behalf Of Byron Nash
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 3:27 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
When is the release due for 2012?
Andy Moorer
Matt Morris
Ahmidou Lyazidi
http://vimeo.com/20538565
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist
http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
Steven Caron
s
Meng-Yang Lu
Ciaran Moloney
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Maybe Ahmidou could write an ICE node to upload his viewport directly to vimeo?
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Steven Caron
s
Matt Morris
Sam Cuttriss
hopefully performance scales well.
how was your first experience with the new sdk stuff?
_sam
Paul Griswold
Eric Turman
-=T=-
Jens Lindgren
Sent from my iPhone
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Also I want to add axes selection, multi object support, left menu options and maybe rotations, I have an idea for that last one, but not sure it will be that ergonomic.
Ahmidou Lyazidi
but as a C++ noob the more complete SDK example look complex to me. But I'm sure someone experienced will easily find his marks.
Raffaele Fragapane
Unless you mean viewport rendering, in which case, I'm happy they went for the TD friendly bullet point first, but I'm of course biased.
Alan Fregtman
Any plans on making use of that "tools API" in 2012? Sounds perfect for this. :D
Steven Caron
s
Alan Fregtman
Alan Fregtman
Alan Fregtman
Sam Cuttriss
Stefan Kubicek
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek Co-founder
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
1050 Vienna Wehrgasse 9 Austria
Phone: +43/699/12614231
--- www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at ---
-- This email and its attachments are
--confidential and for the recipient only--
Vahan Sosoyan
Brent McPherson
The SDK is definitely aimed at the TD crowd as it is C++ only and drawing and picking is handled by OpenGL. We are providing some sample tools to get people started and I think anyone with a bit of technical knowledge could jump in if they are motivated like Ahmidou.
It follows a tool-based metaphor so you can define a new tool and then attach that to a menu or hotkey and it gets activated like any other tool in Softimage. Plugin tools can also define their own hotkeys and context menus.
Here is screenshot of a box-style manipulator tool that will be in the SDK examples workgroup.
[cid:image0...@01CBD8D4.047A2050]
--
Brent
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi
Sent: 02 March 2011 01:16
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
It seems quite complete to me, you have many predefine function for each type of mouse, picking, and interaction event
but as a C++ noob the more complete SDK example look complex to me. But I'm sure someone experienced will easily find his marks.
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist
http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
2011/3/2 Sam Cuttriss <tea...@gmail.com<mailto:tea...@gmail.com>>
David Saber
--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com
David Saber
Ahmidou Lyazidi
that will affect the mesh without any weigthmap and deformer :)
Cheers
Eugen Sares
why not go for gold and start with a complete sculpting solution, complete
inside SI?
Would be VERY interesting to see how far this can be taken, now that the
doors are open.
Modo has it already!
Best wishes,
Eugen
David Rivera
(no pun intended).
I guess the real question would be : Would Softimage be able to get pair in pair with recent 3d packages
evolution as for this era? (most of them come already as 1-in-all solution: sculpt, paint (ptex), retopo and export modules).
I´d seriously vote for the last module added to softimage in addition to the ones we already got: VOXELS.
That would be... CTRL+5 :)
I´m just picturing it...that Autodesk tech preview video (gaming) plus the ability to do sculpting = Tailor your craziest
game levels at last in a snap.
David.
Ed
Alan Fregtman
from 2005 where you can click and drag along a curvy surface and it
aligns a light with the camera so the spec highlight appears in that
specific clicked area. (Useful for Cars renders.)
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Lpics/lpics_siggraph.mp4
(near the end, at 04:40)
Jean-Philippe Delisle
everything that are needed with the C++ API or will we need to learn OpenGL
too?
-----Message d'origine-----
From: Brent McPherson
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 7:22 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: Softimage 2012
Eugen Sares
> Or that neat tool Pixar had in their Lpics realtime lighting system
> from 2005 where you can click and drag along a curvy surface and it
> aligns a light with the camera so the spec highlight appears in that
> specific clicked area. (Useful for Cars renders.)
3ds max has this since the old days: "Place Highlight" tool.
For those without a 3ds max background: it has a plentitude of nifty
little features, which would be great to have in SI as well.
Learn from the others, copy what's good! No shame.
Ahmidou Lyazidi
AFAIK handeling layers for such high resolution meshes, need some core optimisations, only SI devs could do that.
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Stefan Kubicek
at the place I worked before about brush-based techniques (code-wise).
One of the bigger challenges is to get the system responsive enough for high polygon numbers. The viewport refresh rates are not
the primary problem here, but a paint tool that is responsive and doesn't start to stutter on high poly numers during interaction.
That is: beyond the 200000k poly limit I'd say. Up to this number you can even sculpt in 3dsMax nowadays at quite decent refresh rates
(we needed this for a past project some years ago when exporting to/from Zbrush or Modo was too disruptive to the workflow,
so it had to happen inside the main 3d app, and it turned out that among the big 3, only 3dsMax was fast enough, surprisingly.
Modo or Blender were no option at that time, so I didn't even test those).
For Softimage I think this also means that the standard OpenGL-Viewports won't cut it. A custom Open Display Host solution
could be the solution, where all kinds of graphics buffers and acceleration structures could be used for efficient viewport updates and
tool interaction (e.g. to accelerate ray casting, or avoid raycasting as much as possible in the first place)
On a side note: I came across a company website that had such a sculpting tool for Softimage "in development", among other things,
but the last thing I heard shortly after was that the company went belly up (no, I cannot for the life of me recall the name of that company
or it's website).
Nevertheless, this surely is a massive undertaking and not a spare time project if the plan ist to make a fully fledged solution.
On the other hand, anything is better than what's currently there (i.e. a system not based on a weightmap), even if it's not super fast.
It it allowed to, say, sculpt on a 50.000 poly character in near real time, and supported basic operations like push, pully and smoothing,
I would definitely use it regularly.
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Williams, Wayne
Are retopo tools more doable now?? Looking at some of the latest features of Topogun Beta 2 and just blown away. If this sort of stuff could be done in Softimage man…..uber workflow enhancement modeling wise.
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com]
On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 10:28 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
That's totaly doable now ^^
Brent McPherson
Having said that there are high-level SDK calls for things like:
- switching between drawing in screen-space (pixels) and world-space (xyz)
- functions to display and edit strings on-screen
- ability to load an image from a file (to use as a texture like the buttons in my earlier screenshot)
- calls to prepare OpenGL for picking
So I would say we do a lot of the harder things for you and when you are called you really only need to draw whatever bits you want to
display in your tool. One of the examples we ship is a spotlight creation tool that lets you drag out a spotlight and it simply draws a wireframe triangle from the interest to the light position to the closest point on the visible grid.
glColor3d( 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 );
glBegin( GL_LINE_LOOP );
glVertex3d( m_intPos.GetX(), m_intPos.GetY(), m_intPos.GetZ() );
glVertex3d( l_basePos.GetX(), l_basePos.GetY(), l_basePos.GetZ() );
glVertex3d( m_lightPos.GetX(), m_lightPos.GetY(), m_lightPos.GetZ() );
glEnd();
And before someone asks... no it doesn't have a highlight placement functionality! ;-)
Funny enough the first 3D product I ever worked in the late 80's was called Alias Sketch! (the original 3D one running on Macs, not the 2D one Autodesk sells now) It had the ability to specify a spotlight by clicking where you wanted the highlight and a lot of other cool features for its time. (especially considering it ran on Macintosh II's with no virtual memory or hardware accelerated graphics) This product was later ported to Irix, heavily overhauled and used as a starting point for Maya. I better stop now before I start sounding too much like one of the old timers... ;-)
Cheers!
--
Brent
Bradley Gabe
I recall, it had no animation or fcurve functionality, but it was still possible to produce animations by incremental modeling with numeric input. For example, I had to animate cell membrane vesicles fusing with a cell wall to illustrate endocytosis, so I created 100 incremental curve profiles, generated 100 incremental lathe models, then rendered each one with incremental camera moves... it was pretty much like doing stop motion animation. :-D
Ponthieux, Joey
If you used Alias Sketch, you are an old timer. For that matter if you worked on any 3D app during the 80's, you're Jurassic dude.....
:)
Joey Ponthieux ____________________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.
Brent McPherson
It was in many ways ahead of its time as it was all about working in 3D perspective views using direct manipulation. (nothing to do with the fact our software graphics pipeline could only handle one 3D view... no sireee. ;-)
Also, had a built-in raytracer (ported from Alias Studio) which was miles ahead of anything else on the Mac at the time.
People really pushed that product hard though animation would have been quite a stretch! Had a long life in the Mac community even after it was discontinued.
--
Brent
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Bradley Gabe
Sent: 02 March 2011 16:23
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
Thomas Helzle
Long ago I worked for a company on an exhibition booth in Superscape
VRT, a pretty expensive, pre-openGL "realtime" visualization software.
The only good thing about it was, that in the editor you had collision
for everything.
It was absolutely stunning to be able to just move a box against the
wall, drop a table to the floor or to create a little helper-ruler to
line up a stack of books against. Never before and after it felt so
natural moving stuff around in 3D...
It's interesting that while in many ways 3D software evolved extremely
since then, in many others it feels quite ancient compared to some
such gems.
That openGL and interaction extension of the SDK looks like something
long overdue - maybe we can finally get some really cool interactive
tools now.
I lately worked a bit in LWcad, and while the surrounding LightWave
9.6 feels retro to the max, LWcad is an amazingly in-scene-interactive
tool. You can't do the same things without much more pain and time in
XSI. Check it out if you like: http://www.wtools3d.com/ The online
docs are all movies...
I don't think the developer would be interested in porting it to XSI,
but just knowing that things like that should be possible now is
encouraging.
Keep the good things coming! :-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Matt Lind
In the area of performance, yes, Realtime shader OpenGL viewport definitely too slow even for mid sized objects. So we attempted the custom display host (CDH). We tried 2 different approaches:
- push the scene from Softimage to the CDH at each update
- use the callbacks supplied by Softimage to rebuild the user's edit in the CDH.
In either approach drawing was significantly faster and interactive. However, depending on the approach taken there were different blocking issues. In the first method the data throughput from Softimage to the CDH was manageable for small to mid-sized scenes, but as the scene complexity increased the bottleneck was the user could work faster than the data could be pushed to the CDH. So there would be lags and situations where the CDH would get confused as some callbacks would be skipped or terminated prematurely when the user started their next edit. In the 2nd approach the callbacks to the CDH were not granular enough to support some of the things we wanted to do. We couldn't get some of the finer details we needed such as per subcomponent information or where the paintbrush was painting at any given moment. The other downside is that the CDH would have to recreate and support all the softimage toolset to maintain a fluid workflow between the CDH and Softimage viewport!
s. Not a task he wanted to undertake.
Painting is doable, but a few details need to be worked out to make it feasible.
Matt
Matt Lind
I missed doing 3D in the 80’s by one year (1990). What do you call that intermediate period? ;0)
Matt
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ponthieux, Joey
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 8:51 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage 2012
Brent,
Schoenberger
>I missed doing 3D in the 80’s by one year (1990). What do you call that intermediate period? ;0)
technical director
The day has 24 hours, if that does not suffice, I will take the night
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Matt Lind
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 8:05 PM
Stefan Kubicek
Warning: I don't know much about what mechanisms the CDH supports to keep data in sync with Softimage, so please bear with me for the following:
Wouldn't it be sufficient to have some "paint" tools in the CDH which allow modification of a copy of the scene object (effectively doubling the memory requirements of the paintable object thouGH) to paint on, and after each paint stroke, or even manually by pressing a button if that's not fast enough, push the data (ideally only the modified parts) of the modified object back to the Softimage (non-CDH) side of things?
On second thought, this is what you'd get with simple "Send to Mudbox" and "Send back to Softimage" button too. Oh well...
Steven Caron
s
Matt Lind
As for recreating softimage tools, in order for the CDH to be effective it needs to support basics like lighting, camera navigation, transforming things, and possibly some topology editing. Again, we're not strictly painting colors, but other attributes as well. That's what game developers do. If we only cared about painting pixels or vertices and nothing else, then we could probably do a viewport in a vacuum approach. But our requirements are much more demanding making the problem to be solved more complex.
Ideally, the realtime shader OpenGL viewport would be the place to do all this as then we'd only have to write custom realtime shaders and possibly a topology operator while Softimage takes care of the UI related stuff. But the performance of the realtime shader OpenGL viewport is several magnitudes too slow for that and we still don't have enough access to basic things, like knowing what the paintbrush is doing, to do what we want.