Lagoa on CGSociety

[Rob Wuijster]

Interview with Thiago Costa:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5866

Enjoy!

Rob
\/-------------\/----------------\/

[John Payne]

Yea Lagoa has even got the Maya guys talking where I'm working ...
Don't worry Fellas, AD marketing is just trying to squeeze the last few dollars
out of Max and Maya.

- John

[Gene Crucean]

What I can't believe is that it took something like Lagoa to make the Maya/Max guys actually see the potential of ICE.

--
[Gene Crucean] - [VFX & CG Supervisor/Generalist]
** Freelance for hire **

[tak...@earthlink.net]

Well most of the Max guys seemed to feel that "thinking particles" were pretty similar to ICE with regard to basic particle effects.  So they probably felt it was fine enough to stick with what they had.

-T

[Steven Caron]

i guess they like 'feeling' all the compatibility issues...

s

[Gene Crucean]

But that's exactly my point. It just seems they only looked at the surface and then passed on it... "because it's so similar". When in reality...

It just surprises me that's all.

[Steven Caron]

interesting comment at the end...

"Autodesk is the exclusive licensor of some Lagoa Materials such as Lagoa Generic Liquid, Lagoa Spray, Lagoa Jello, Lagoa Soft Body, etc."

so they licensed Lagoa and the nodes which set the attributes that make something more liquid like versus something like jello?

if thiago were to make a 'Lagoa Brick' material then it would be freely distributed without autodesk legal issues?

s

[peter boeykens]

I think it’s a matter of mindset and expectations.

 

Softimage users are used to general purpose tools which have to be adapted for doing specific tasks.

Not so much results at a single click of a button - but with some effort the possibilities are quite extended.

 

Max users are more used to tools doing very specific tasks with little effort - with Maya users somewhere in the middle I guess?

 

With such expectations, a framework like ICE must seem rather unusual and not so easy to grasp or categorize.

While a very practical, purpose driven, toolset like Lagoa - shows the potential of ICE in a very concrete way - it does dynamics and physics.

Anyone can look at the demo and decide its useful for them or not. 

 

 

Its a bit like scripting.

If you're not familiar with it, you might have difficulties understanding its use.

Once you get into it - you see that it can become what you make out of it - and has applications all through the software and beyond.

 

But no-one has difficulties understanding the use of a particular scripted tool or a plugin:

it will do a specific task - and if you want to solve that task, the tool is useful for you.

 

In the end - both of them are an extension of the same thing: the internals of the software exposed to users.

For certain people this has immediate appeal, while some couldn’t care less, but they still might look for any custom scripts they can lay their hands on.

 

...

just my 2 eurocent. 

[Jens Lindgren]

Even more interesting is this:

 

"Of course, he'd like to integrate the engine solver into many other packages. All in good time."

 

Looks like its coming to Max and Maya also...

 

Jens

[John Richard Sanchez]

Yeah thats what stuck out at me.

--
John Richard Sanchez
www.johnrichardsanchez.com

[Steven Caron]

maya maybe... max i dont see that happening. autodesk doesn't seem to be investing in improving max in the fx/dynamics area at all, they leave that up the the third party.

s

[Eric Thivierge]

Will Maya even be able to handle it?

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com

[kevin mc bride]

It would suck a ton if lagoa was shoehorned into maya...its a real unique selling point for softimage amongst the autodesk packages, here in a mainly max outfit i have the lads salivating over the lagoa vids. would hate to see it becoming multi platform, but thats just me being greedy :P

[John Payne]

Yep, no real improvements in Max since 2008, except for interface tweaks and Mental Ray integration.
Nothing to make you feel more ripped off than if you paying good money to stay current in Max.
A lot of shops in NYC haven't even bothered to upgrade Maya since 2008.  I'm working in Maya 2009 now
and nobodies feelin the urge here to upgrade to 2011 (even though they have the licenses!).  What was
Maya's last big enhancement, NCloth and NParticles?   With Soft there are pretty some advantages to
upgrading, especially now with Lagoa.  Soft might just be the honey to get Maya and Max users on the new
AD subscription plan.

- John

[Gene Crucean]

I honestly haven't seen any innovation (a few plugins purchased and jammed in) in Max since I used it back in the v2 - v4 days. But I guess that's my pov on Max. It's why I left for Softimage.

Sorry I just realized that was pretty much OT. Moving along...

[Jens Lindgren]

Well... They integrated PhysX in the upcoming Subscription Advantage Pack for Max.

Jens

Sent from my iPhone

[Steven Caron]

you mean they packaged the physx that was already available? or is this a rewrite?

s

[Jens Lindgren]

Don't know. I just saw the video on ADs YouTube channel.

A lot of presets and a "Physical Material Editor" that looked just like Max ordinary material editor but with physical attributes instead.

Pretty much a lot of one-click solutions.

I watched it only at work without sound so don't know that much about it.

Jens

Sent from my iPhone

[Steven Caron]

link?

[Jens Lindgren]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huoiB95dW4A

There should be more videos in the AD channel on YouTube about Maya Subscription Advantage Pack also. It has som Craft Animation car rigs I think. 

Jens

Sent from my iPhone

[Jens Lindgren]

Forgot to add that both Max and Maya will get som sort of procedural texture system called "Substance" that's resolution independent and creates all the maps you need.

It's really simple. You can just load a Ground preset and then drag the dirt slider up and you have a dirtier material.

I can't find the YouTube link right now but it's also in the sutodesk channel so it shouldn't be hard to find.

Sent from my iPhone

On 16 sep 2010, at 00:04, Steven Caron <car...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Steven Caron]

lol great! now we got 3 physx plugins we gotta manage. one with thinking particles, one with rayfire, and one that ships with max. i know somewhere these plugin dlls will get mis matched and cause me and others here headache

s

[Gene Crucean]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTuHINP7KTo

So their innovation is... procedural maps? Bad. Ass.

[Schoenberger]

 

For me that one can be compared to a big collection of shader compounds.

But I do not know why you have to define a pixel resulution if the textures are procedural, so theroretically infinite resolution...

 

While we are on that topic, is there any website with good shader compounds for XSI?

 

PS: count how many times you hear "Substance!.."

Holger Schönberger
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 Gene Crucean
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 1:11 AM

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Lagoa on CGSociety

[Alan Fregtman]

I was gonna say... hey, that looks a lot like MapZone from
Allegorithmic. Turns out they develop "Substance". Go figure.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/?PAGE=PRODUCTS

This has been out for years but if you didn't know, MapZone is a free
nodal tileable procedural texture generator:
http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

It's very much like a rendertree for procedurals, then when you're
done they get rendered to a tileable image with the resolution you
choose.

[Alan Fregtman]

You define a resolution because under the hood, they just slapped on
this: http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/ (Same developer, older product.)

It's the way it works.

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Schoenberger <X...@digidragon.de> wrote:
>
> For me that one can be compared to a big collection of shader compounds.
> But I do not know why you have to define a pixel resulution if the textures
> are procedural, so theroretically infinite resolution...
>
> While we are on that topic, is there any website with good shader compounds
> for XSI?
>
> PS: count how many times you hear "Substance!.."

> Holger Sch�nberger

[Bradley Gabe]

 

PS: count how many times you hear "Substance!.."

 

One might call it "substance" abuse.

 

 

Holger Schönberger
technical director
The day has 24 hours, if that does not suffice, I will take the night

 

 

Okay, no more language humor from me, I promise...

[adrian wyer]

“Okay, no more language humor from me, I promise...”

 

Awww brad, that’s why we keep you around!!!!  ;-)

 

Adrian Wyer
Fluid Pictures
16-18 Beak St.
London W1F 9RD
T.++44(0) 207 434 3565
F.++44(0) 207 100 1989
E. adria...@fluid-pictures.com
www.fluid-pictures.com

Fluid Pictures Limited is registered in England and Wales.
Company number:5657815
VAT number: 872 6893 71

[Andy Moorer]

(Ssssh Adrian don't encourage him, once you get him started he's as hard to stop as Robin Williams... ;)

Shoen, about the best stuff in procedural texturing for XSI that I've seen is still enhance http://www.shaders.co.uk/enhance_xsi/index.htm

- AM

[Adam Seeley]

Has anybody had much luck with with the BA 2d to procedural shader workflow.

 

We tried but didn't have enough time to put into it to know what we were really doing.

 

http://www.binaryalchemy.de/develop/shd_vol/info_synthesis.htm

 

 

Adam

 

 

	Adam Seeley Senior Numpty, Commercials, UK T: +44 (0)20 7565 1000   E: adam....@primefocusworld.com@primefocusworld.com www.primefocusworld.com

 

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Andy Moorer
Sent: 16 September 2010 14:45
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: 3dsmax Substance (was Lagoa on CGSociety)

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.851 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3135 - Release Date: 09/15/10 19:34:00

[Daniel H]

Does anyone know why CGSociety suddenly pulled the Lagoa/Thiago interview off of their web site? (I can still get to page 1 in the Google cache, but not page 2.) Did CGS release it too early?

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5866

[Andy Moorer]

I just saw that too, in fact I returned to this thread to doublecheck
the link. A pity, I was going to forward the article to some
coworkers.

[Schoenberger]

The current version It does not work with every texture and you have to do run it multiple times with different settings to get a nice result.

I am working to improve that with a complete new version.

 

PS:

There are already a few 3D images that are delivered with the latest version 3.7:

http://www.binaryalchemy.de/develop/shd_vol/img/3d_library_overview.jpg

 

Holger Schönberger
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 Adam Seeley
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 3:55 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: 3dsmax Substance (was Lagoa on CGSociety)

[Dan Yargici]

OK, so I was on holiday and came back to find this... :)

Any word on when it might re-surface?  or why indeed it was pulled?

Thanks,

DAN

[Jason Wells]

My personal opinion on this is that it was taken down at AD's request because in the second paragraph the author of the article wrote "Of course, he'd like to integrate the engine solver into many other packages. All in good time".

Sorry to be cynical but I thought this was just a sly way of saying "looks great, but don't worry about switching, it might be out for your app soon".

Anyways, a cached version can be found here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:T6HlAUCkhSoJ:features.cgsociety.org/story.php%3Fstory_id%3D5866+cgsociety+lagoa&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Cheers

Jason.

---

From: Dan Yargici <danya...@gmail.com>
To: ro...@casema.nl; soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Sent: Tuesday, 21 September, 2010 10:04:18

Subject: Re: Lagoa on CGSociety

[Dan Yargici]

Hmmm, interesting... thanks for the link....

DAN

[Daniel H]

Just received an e-mail back from Paul the Editor for CGSociety. The Lagoa M. interview wasn't cleared for release, but will be back online soon.

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Possible, but probably not in the bad light you perceive it in.
Haven't had a chance to speak with Paul yet, but articles like this normally need to be cleared by all parties involved before release.
It's very possible that Ubi, AD or Thiago found something in there to be incorrect or giving away too much too early, and asked for it to be pulled.

The fact it's taking a while for it to come back usually points at something that simply wasn't approved and needs approval. If it was just the one statement an editorial pass for a day would have been all that was needed.
There's a jungle of corporate and marketing rules you have to cut through when posting these articles, and you're usually handed a tiny nail trimmer instead of a machete, as an editor, when doing the article.

I'll see if I can get hold of Paul for a clarification.

[Dan Yargici]

Hmmm, it's been a week a still nothing.  Seems strange... do you suppose they're waiting for the launch?