Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5
1) Ability to switch between icons or text. 2) Clean attribute editor, with the ability to open separate windows for each property (no, copy tabs does not count). Oh, and just a small one, dating back from the cretaceous: ability to change parameters on multiple selections. Still can't be done in maya, unless you indulge in some component editor list wrestling voodoo or script it... 3) Functional unified node editor (look at ice/rendertree - keyword = consistency (right now you have 3 graph editors in maya, that more or less do the same and look completely different) 4) Clean Outliner/Explorer, with a better organised structure items (scene, layers, sets, passes, render settings, materials, trax sources, clips). etc. Right now, unchecking dag only just throws a mess in your face. Take a look at xsi, all that stuff is placed under the application tab filter (explorer). Why in the world would anyone want a list of uncatalogued everything, all mashed together? Same goes for the node editor. Clean these things up and make them readable by human beings. For example, if i graph a simple sphere in maya, i get 3 nodes in the graph. Logical for maya people, not so much for everyone else. Now try to graph an object with some history in it, a rig, and some deformers. Sweet mother spiderweb. Let me light one up so i can calm my eyes. 5) Make the node editor functional. Example: those white balls around every node's input or output, are so close to the expand/contract icon, that 4 out of 5 times you will inadvertently click wrong. Why is that a good idea? Clicking on a node or an output gets you a mini connection editor to choose stuff from. This is a contradiction. It's either a node editor or a connection editor. Should not be both. Now look at ice. No floating component list to pick from. The nodes have everything encapsulated inside of them. No need for an extra list above the node's already existing list. You want a parameter, expand the node and drag it out. Now i understand the logic of it, as in, being able to make a connection even with the node minimized. But it's not making things easier, it is complicating them. Here's yoda trying to make a node connection in maya: ...hmm, what's easier, the bigger white balls giving me the floating connection editor, or the slighty smaller colored balls showing me the same parameter list. Balls i must choose, before node i connect. Study: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=consistency Exam: get a non maya user to work with it. If he doesn't understand what is happening in 5 mins, work still needs to be done. I know it sounds a little annoying because i am little annoyed. Just get the useful stuff out and ignore the spite. Peace, O On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote: That is why we are offering webinars on the roadmap privately. cv/ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [ softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Nicolas Esposito [ 3dv...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 7:37 AM To: r...@casema.nl; softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5 Is there a Maya roadmap to check what effort they'll make in order to have the same functionalities that Softimage currently have? Translated into: How many years we have to wait to get Maya at the same level of Softimage? 2014-03-25 12:29 GMT+01:00 Rob Wuijster r...@casema.nlmailto: r...@casema.nl: And how about letting you build your own custom UI, like in SI. And no, having the windows reopen in the same place doesn't count. Rob \/-\/\/ On 25-3-2014 11:30, Daniel Kim wrote: If I add some more about interface, * Right click to bring contextual menu which is related to selected element (not just like always fixed popup menu) * All remap-able user keyboard Daniel --- Daniel Kim Animation Director Professional 3D Generalist http://www.danielkim3d.com --- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.comhttp://www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4354 / Virus Database: 3722/7243 - Release Date: 03/25/14 -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) CG VFX www.okto.ro
Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5
Icons are great for people comfortable with the application, not that much for everyone else. A perfect example of an elegant solution would be what the sidefx dev team did when doing their own version of the shelf. They added 3 modes for displaying it: icons, text and icons with text underneath. The shelf in maya, has always been icons only. Yes you can hover the mouse over the icons and it will show you what that icon represents, but it's pretty annoying to have to do that all the time, or learn the shapes of the icons. Yes, you can also hack it, by building your own custom color square, and use that for every single shelf button, and then add a custom label for each, taking into account that you can't use more than 6 or 7 letters for each square, thus reducing things like rigid link to rgdlnk...and this is exactly the point - this is the maya way...hacking your way through with a mental machete, instead of just having things layed out elegantly in front of you. The truly great thing about text is that it is usually consistent throughout all 3d applications. A sphere, an extrude, a cut, a material, a vertex etc, are all usually the same in all apps, or similar concepts very easy to translate mentally. While a square cut in 4 sides with one side greenish and arrow pointing at it (component selection icon), or a set of bowling pins with a large circle around them (rigid body from selection) is only in maya. If i am a max, lightwave, c4d, houdini, xsi etc user, and i see a set of bowling pins, how does that make me think of rigid bodies from selection? i could think of nurbs or game engine tools or shading or who knows what. Each of us understands an image differently, but a rigid body from selection is the same to everyone working in 3d. Does this make sense? Cheers, Octav On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:56 PM, Andy Goehler lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.comwrote: Would you want to ged rid of that massive arrow in the MCP too? :-) Icons have their place, they need to communicate well and be used with care. The Nuke toolbar icons work great IMHO. Cheers, Andy On 25.03.2014, at 17:40, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: 1. Text based everything - I hate the shelf in Softimage as well as the UV editor. Get rid of icons entirely. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) CG VFX www.okto.ro
Re: humanize Maya, SOFT top 5
Oh yes, i seem to remember that one, but doesn't it just give you horrible visual results, where nothing is separated and it's all a long character spaghetti? My brain must be partially fried from so much app switching.
Re: Softimage transition comparison aid
This list is getting weirder by the day On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nlwrote: The inclusion of Jimmy Saville seems to be rather inappropriate IMHO... - Leendert A. Hartog - Softimage hobbyist AKA Hirazi Blue - Administrator @, NOT the owner of si-community.com -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Ancient lurker's response to the current developments
That was actually quite refreshing. Thanks for putting those thoughts down Stefan. Nothing new under the sun, but definitely made a very good read. On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.comwrote: Interesting read, and welcome to the list Stefan! On 19 March 2014 09:04, s...@animagic.net wrote: Hi All, Hi, I'm Stefan. Some of you may recognize my name, some of you might not. I think I might be an ancient lurker on the list here because I can't recall when last I posted anything to the list. I suspect it might have been sometime in the early 90's. I could look it up but I'd have to find some old archive somewhere in my backups. :-) The most recent events about Softimage, and now the outcry from 3ds max users about their upgrade along with many friends and old colleagues I've been talking to in the past week inspired me to write some of my thoughts down about what I see is happening and how I think Autodesk has passed the point of no-return when it comes to their position in the community (a large one which is still separated by products and their users). It's SFW but be prepared for some harsh paragraphs. http://www.stefandidak.com/2014/03/autodesk-the-metastasizing-cancer-of-the-3d-world/ Cheers, Stefan. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Maya render region!
This is definitely going to show up soon as a revolutionary new feature in maya. I'm betting someone is already making an offer. Btw, houdini also has had a render region for a while now, that kind of works, when it does not offset itself for no apparent reason. But at least it's in there. On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:06 AM, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: Nice digging Raff, seems like the tip of the ICE berg. :) On 20 March 2014 02:26, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.comwrote: Should be noted I -REALLY- don't know for sure what I'm talking about here, I don't even know if the event tracker in Google refers to the patent office events after they are published or to some Google service itself. Don't throw parties yet or anything :p On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: Apparently it first lapsed and then expired because it wasn't maintained, at least according to Google patents. http://www.google.com/patents/US6091422?dq=avid+technology+render#v=onepageqf=false I have to admit not being entirely sure of how Google patents works (if the feed is accurate), and whether it can be revived, but yeah, there you have it. Autodesk apparently doesn't pay its bills ;) On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:01 AM, Gustavo Eggert Boehs gustav...@gmail.com wrote: thats great and all, but AD holds the patent for the renderregion now, so unless it has expired this would be... illegal? -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Re[2]: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates.
algorithm, but I'd expect that kind of thing in a service pack / point release. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Ben Rogall xsi_l...@shaders.moederogall.commailto:xsi_l...@shaders.moederogall.com wrote: http://area.autodesk.com/march18 [http://static.avast.com/emails/avast-mail-stamp.png] http://www.avast.com/ Diese E-Mail ist frei von Viren und Malware, denn der avast! Antivirus http://www.avast.com/ Schutz ist aktiv. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Re[2]: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates.
Except viewport 2.0. I'll admit...that's pretty good. So at least they got the viewport rightyay! On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: Bifrost... former 3rd-party sw (Naiiad), acquired... XGen... 3rd-party Disney plugin, licensed... Bullet Physics... free 3rd-party library... OpenSubDiv... free 3rd-party library... Allow me to add NEX (aka the maya modeling toolkit) to that listaquired 3rd party plugin All that autodesk ever does, is aquire tech and then slap it on top of their software. Right now, maya feels like a bloated piece of junk, exactly because of that. The experience is one of constant confusion, running around feeling like things do not belong there, always struggling to do stuff, going about like your going from one country to another. Softimage was always consistent in its user experience, and that made it a pleasure to work with. Maya right now is extremely inconsistent because most of its new tech are in fact solutions developed by 3rd parties. It's an incredibly inconsistent and frustrating experience. Maybe they will get it right, someday. The problem is, they never got it right in the past, and they didn't get it right today...which is what matters to us. Right now it feels like a mess. Plus my brain just hurts at the amount of overlapping tech going on inside maya right now. Even bifrost vs Nfluids. What the heck is that. Make up your mind. I'm also curious, does bifrost talk to ncloth or nhair, does it talk to bullet or physx, does ncloth talk to bullet or xgen, does xgen talk to bifrost? Remember those discussions years ago about unifying maya's dynamics when nucleus came out at version 8.5. That was apparently going somewhere, at snail pace, but hey at least it felt like it was moving until ...hey, what is this new stuff called naiad... let's just snatch that and do something with it. Oh wait, what do we do with nucleus. Uhmm, well, let's just keep it around and see what happens. Bullet...hey, it's free, let's just integrate that as well. Physx, oh wait, we've integrated that some time ago...we've bragged about it for a while...let's just keep that in there as well. So now, you tell me, you have 4 simulation frameworks inside maya, that do not send data back and forth between them? Correct me if i am wrong...because i so wish i was wrong... On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 9:32 PM, Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.com wrote: Very high. Productization occurs when we gauge that there is very little risk. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eugen Sares Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:24 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re[2]: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. How high then to you estimate the risk of Bifröst succeeding - meaning becoming a widely accepted, fully capable ICE equivalent? And how long do you believe it will take? -- Originalnachricht -- Von: Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.commailto: maurice.pa...@autodesk.com An: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Gesendet: 18.03.2014 20:20:00 Betreff: RE: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. I want to be clear - my meaning was that innovation involves risk and we want to take that risk for certain projects. We do NOT accept 99% failure. If uou have a chance of 1 in 100 of succeeding on project X that does not mean you should not try it. But it also does not mean you should bet everything on it. This is true of any company small or large. The further out there you want to be, the greater the risk. Maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc..autodesk.commailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Greg Punchatz Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:13 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. And shader effects are 3rd party I believe...and it only works for the view port... sigh Same with the modeling tools...just upgraded what they bought Here is the problem The folks in charge don't know that they have a problem... They accept a 99 percent failure rate as reasonable...smaller dev companies cant afford to fail nearly that much. I will say I am looking forward to that viewport... and geodeskic binding is uber cool. I wonder how long it will take some ICE wiz to make some of that for us :) On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.com mailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com wrote: The Maya release feels like a list of plugins to me: Bifrost... former 3rd-party sw (Naiiad
Re: Anyone in the SI list transitioning to MODO? -Please add your mail here
Would like to take a closer look at it myself. okt...@gmail.com On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Steffen Dünner steffen.duen...@gmail.comwrote: We'll jump on the Modo train (at least partly as long as Softimage still runs on current hardware). I think it has great potential and at that pricetag it's really a no-brainer to add to ones arsenal. ;) I've been watching / evaluating it for some time now and so far I have only been pleasantly surprised. Even the deformation / animation / rigging part looks and feels quite mature for the short time it exists. 2014-03-08 21:22 GMT+01:00 David Rivera activemotionpictu...@yahoo.com: Hi, I was really touched by some of the in-depth opinions about leaving SI. TD´s perspective, and other users who have dedicated their lives (literally) to build a rock-solid pipeline for studios all around the world using softimage, have really made me think a lot into consideration. So, to cut a long story short, I´d like to know if there´s a thread in the list that´s already being aligned into the Softimage/MODO transition? If not, I´d like to start it off with this post. I´m going into MODO and here´s my email: david_rivera...@yahoo.com Thanks. *David Rivera* *3D Compositor/Animator* LinkedIN http://ec.linkedin.com/in/3dcinetv Behance https://www.behance.net/3dcinetv VFX Reel https://vimeo.com/70551635 -- PGP-ID(RSA): 0xD6E0CE93 Fingerprint: 879F 572C FEE4 9DE5 53A8 3C1C 22A9 C8DE D6E0 CE93 -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Listening
to know why, because you chose to go with Maya and cover your mistakes. If you only had a light of vision and innovation, just by simple developing further Softimage and the FX tree, you will be ahead of what The Foundry is aming with Nuke and Modo. Everything is there to have a full round trip to a 3D and Comp solution in a single tool. If you care to take a close look at the FX tree and compare it to Nuke, they don't look very distant. Just add roto, tracking, and port the 3D space to the FX tree viewer, and guess what you will have... But again, you are more focused into covering your looses for placing good money on the wrong place. Keep going the direction you are going, and I can forecast that in a few years, not only Softimage will start to fade out. But also Autodesk, at least in this market. You want a strong contender for what is coming? The name is Softimage. Well I hope that you really listen, and this is not one more of your lies. --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: It was always about the people
This was the nicest thing i have read in a very long time. Thank you for taking the time to put it together, Marc. Cheers, Octav On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Marc Brinkley marc.brink...@microsoft.comwrote: Hello folks (sorry for the long read) Been reading and thinking about this all week. What I realized was that as great a piece of software that is Softimage, it has always been about the people. I have been connected to this software for close to 19 years in some way. First time was on an SGI Indy just after the MS purchase and all the way to today. A few side trips to Max and Maya along the way. But even with all the great things I made with this software, when people asked me why I stuck with it for so long the simple answer was the people. Not too long after XSI shipped, we were starting to use it on a new game when Gareth Morgan came calling. He sat down with us and asked what can they do better for us. What do you need and how can we make things better for you. I can assure you, no one from Alias or Autodesk ever asked us. We were a small developer back in the day but the fact that someone at SI would want to talk with us made all the difference in the world. Alias finally came to visit us, only after we were acquired by EA and got established as EA Chicago. Alias was told to visit us. The Alias sales guy even said to me had they known we existed they would have visited us sooner. He then asked what product we used on our last game...which was pretty successful (NBA Street). I told him Softimage. He laughed and said it probably wasn't a very good game. That was my introduction to companies outside of Softimage. Autodesk wasn't much better in their attitude. It was always clear that Softimage cared deeply about its customers and connected in a personal way. A way that always made me feel that they were there as a partner helping me solve problems. Whether it was flying to Montreal to meet with the dev team. Visits from Gareth. Phone calls to Manny to help us out. Passionate discussions on the beta list with Chinny. Christine Charette manning the beta list and licenses. Jen Goldfinch of course. Poor Simon Inwood and David that put up with me during our custom builds on the dead and buried Marvel project. Siggraph meetings and beers until late in the night...Boston! Erik and his wall of toys. Olivier and everyone at Special Projects. Countless others that were there along with us fighting the fight. Luc-Eric, Dominic, Martin, St Blair, Alexandre, Robert, Brent, Marc-Andre...so many others I cant recall them all. The day we got shut down in Chicago I reached out to Marc Stevens directly to let him know we were getting closed. He asked how he could help. I told him I have a lot of artists that need to make demo reels. He offered up 6 months of SI so that my artists could get their reels done and help them find a new job. That was close to 20-30 people. During my job hunting trip to EA Montreal, I stopped by the Saint-Laurent office and went out for drinks with my Softimage friends. Even Gareth, long gone from Softimage came out as well. Late that evening with Jen and Gareth, still knowing that here were people that still cared. This from a software company. And there was the mailing list. To my first smack down by Kim (still stings!) to today, this list has been an integral part of my career. A wealth of passion and knowledge, this list has always been something that I have been thankful for. The people here have been just as helpful and passionate as the people making the software. After the acquisition...well we know now. But through all of it. The people were the reasons I stayed. My career has me on a new path and while I am still in CG and games I have not been hands on in the last 5 years. But it was and has always been the community of people that defined Softimage. From the people who make it to those that use it. If there was one wish I have, it's that somehow, some way, this community carries on. Hope to see everyone on the other side my friends. Cheers -marc -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Save Softimage on Facebook and Reddit
that's an even better one. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Actually, all people who worked at Softimage are using this one on Facebook... you should have seen it Jason as you most probably have a lot of ex-softies on your feed?! ;) From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Octavian Ureche Sent: 5 mars 2014 08:34 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Save Softimage on Facebook and Reddit or this one taken straight from nick and the same one with a little more contrast. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Ognjen Vukovic ognj...@gmail.com wrote: i like the 2.2 gamma version better :) On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:24 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe a bit lighter would be better. On 03/05/14 8:17, Jason S wrote: Perhaps an avatar Icon would be good, (perhaps not as extreme as suggesting retiring autodesk) How about following the green avatar model from RH but with the original Softimage Purple? J On 03/05/14 8:06, Ognjen Vukovic wrote: Linkedin could be a good place to go to... On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Nick Martinelli n...@nickmartinelli.net wrote: Wow, in less than 24 hours we are already 1329 strong! This is incredible, well done list! For those of you who have signed, I can't thank you enough. When I meet any of you in person I will buy you a beer (but please not all at once). The more people we have on there the better. I know I'm bugging my family and friends to sign. Just to make you all aware, as of right now there are two other ways you can contribute. Someone made a facebook page that can be found here https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Softimage-XSI/543470605760224 I would love it if we all Liked the page Also the petition was put up on Reddit which can be found here http://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1zkfiv/save_softimage_petition/ I'm not a reddit user, but I did make an account just to up vote the petition. Here is a quick .jpg showing where you should click for reddit noobs like me. I personally hate anything where I need to ask people to make an account to do something but I think you are all like me and want to get this out there to as many people as as we can. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we don't use all the avenues available. If anyone else has any suggestions of where to post the petition or any other ways to raise awareness, go for it and let us know, lets make as much noise as possible. -- Nick Martinelli www.nickMartinelli.net n...@nickmartinelli.net -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro inline: image001.jpg
Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list
it was managed and conceived. Not only it's an incredibly ponderous decision with inevitable gravity, it was also announced with barely any time to spare between its intended date and some hard dates on its effects. Of everything I heard and read insofar it's not so much the killing of Soft I find unacceptable (I guess I was well resigned in those regards, not that it doesn't sadden me enormously), as much as what picture it paints of AD customer management when they do such a thing, and proceed to aggravate the issue with nebulous information and an unacceptably short window of time for the user base to make some rather consequential decisions. But are the competitors any better? Any more accessible and transparent in their communication and dealings? Well, I was having an exchange in private with Brad Peebler, founder of Luxology, and I put to him whether the Foundry/Luxology would have the flexibility and agility to do something about short term. Turns out they do. In a few hours they set up everything for a *50% discount on Modo*purchases. No strings attached, just because I jokingly challenged him to. *Go to the online store and use the coupon raffofkahn for half price check-out.* I'm not a Modo user, nor have the time or inclination right now to become one. I'm not going to suddenly wish AD any ill or stop using their products, though they sure did their damnest to make me even more guarded when dealing with their PR and promises. I did really enjoy dealing with the Foundry in the past though, and I have now to extend that respect to its Luxology arm. At the very least they are willing to act transparently and unconditionally on matters all the way from the top of the product chain. Cheers, Raff P.S. The actual coupon's text was Brad's idea, not mine! I imagine he read my signature and thought I was a Trekkie or something like that. P.P.S. I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm not a modo user, I'm not getting freebies, it has nothing to do with my employer, what the hell, it barely has anything to do with me outside the last few hours and this e-mail itself. I simply thought it was a nice and significant gesture on Brad's side and decided to help him reach out on account of his personality and display of good will. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- gonebadfx.com - your source for bad fx -- -- -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement
No matter what assurances autodesk ever gives, i don't think anyone will ever believe them anymore. But then again, histories have a way of repeating themselves... Let's just hope this was the last time they managed to fool us. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:35 PM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] j.ponthi...@nasa.gov wrote: Indeed. This decision does make one wonder if this will be a CUBICOMP moment for AD ME. Trust is not something sold like a software maintenance agreement. It's earned. I started using Softimage 20 years ago this very month. In all those years not even Avid or Microsoft put the production methodology I use in such jeopardy. The work I have been doing in Soft is so heavily dependent ICE now it can't be done the same way or even transferred to Maya or Max. How am I to replace this? There is no current Autodesk equivalent to Softimage, especially in regards to ICE. I understand that softwares mature and new paradigms emerge. I've been through the whole Picturemaker-Vertigo-Picturemaker, Quantel-Express V, PowerAnimator/TAV-Maya, 3dStudio-Max, and SI3D-XSI paradigm shifts. I even suffered through the demise of Aurora, Matador, and Shake. But why isn't there an equivalent alternative to move to before Softimage is terminated? Even if I do migrate to another AD ME software, can I trust that AD won't abandon it as well? Sketchbook anyone? Can anyone at AD give me a concrete assurance that this kind of abandonment, and loss of investment, won't happen again? -- Joey Ponthieux __ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Jordi Bares Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 12:35 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement This is probably the worst decisions Autodesk has taken. Looking back a the Gold Lion at Cannes, VES awards, the BTAA awards over the last few years where the work done by this close knit community has been recognised I am shocked you really think you by killing Softimage you are committed to providing our customers with the most technologically advanced products and highest quality customer service possible My feeling is that you as a company have not gauged correctly how easy is to loose the trust of an entire community and how hard is going to get it back if at all possible. Good luck Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com On 4 Mar 2014, at 17:01, Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.com wrote: Over the past week there have been many rumors about the future of Softimage posted on various forums and social media sites. Many of you have been looking for an official confirmation or denial from Autodesk. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to respond until today as we needed to finalize all the details of our plans. But yes Softimage 2015 will be the last release of the software. I wanted to share some of those details with you: - Softimage 2015 will be the last release of the software - We will continue to support the software and develop hot fixes and service packs for two more years - If they wish to, customers on Subscription will be able to transition to Maya or 3ds Max at no cost while retaining the right to continue to use Softimage in production/ - Existing customers will be able to purchase additional seats and/or rental plans if they need to scale production Below is a copy of the letter that was sent electronically to Softimage customers today. I have copied it here as our email distribution lists not allow us to send it to those who have opted out. Because several of our partners have started posting the news early, we are responding now but please note our web sites have not had time to upload all the information yet. As early as possible but by no later than 3pm EST, we will have loaded all the information including a detailed FAQ on www.autodesk.com/softimagehttp://www.autodesk.com/softimage. In the interim I have also copied and pasted it below Within the next 15 minutes you can also visit http://area.autodesk.com/softimagetransition to register for a live QA webinar on Marc 18th at 12pm EST. as well as see the full documentation of what is new in Softimage 2015. Maurice Patel Autodesk -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list
Chris, you might be right. I worked about a full year in houdini doing things i should have done in xsi, and it was a bloody pain. I tried to model a phone once and that was before the shelf existed. For every surface operation i did, i had to throw down a node in the graph. After 2 days, i just went home and did it all in xsi, in about 3 hours. So i understand where you're coming from. I am not a fan of houdini's workflow when it comes to stuff i usually did in xsi. I definitely understand its potential for handling complexity, but as a good friend and collaborator of mine was saying today, it is a perverse little piece of software, and i will explain why. He said that its procedural paradigm works so well, that even for an artist like him (and he is the least technical guy i know), it became fascinating to hook things together and just find your way through the logical maze. So he was saying, that in that sense, this kind of workflow has a way of drawing you in and making you forget the big picture at times. I stood near houdini people and watched them completely lose focus on the end result, just hooking shit up just for the sake of finding a procedural solution, sometimes a multitude of solutions, almost obsessively, to stuff i was able to do in a quarter of that time in xsi, non procedurally of course. But the client never cared. So in that sense, i agree, that it is hard to impossible for houdini to reach that level of abstraction in which it is able to retain its procedural paradigm, but make things flow smoothly on the surface and make the user forget about all the things that happen behind the curtains. I would also like to add blender to this list, which i've been keeping an eye out for some time, and they have made great strides with the app. Though open source tools never feel as polished as their commercial counterparts, but that's a whole other topic. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: After spending a year working in Houdini I'm not sure sideFX can do that make it more artist friendly. Have you ever tried modelling something in there or even unwrapping it. Feck. For years there has been a push for side FX to make the software more artist friendly...and it just never gets there. Why do I have to put expressions in to do light inclusion/exclusion? I am not a technical person and I found Houdini incredibly aggravating to work with. It has some really nice things going for it and I see the advantages from a technical/FX stand point. But to become a tool I can quickly crank some style frames out of...never happen. I'd go to C4D before using Houdini for that stuff. I'm with Timyou get Redshift over into Modo...I think that's going somewhere. It would be easier to develop Modo going forward then to backwards engineer HoudiniI think. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: I like modo, i really do, but i just can't wrap my head around the idea of a modeling application becoming an allrounder. I think tremendous rnd effort will be required from the dev team to get it even close to where xsi is right now, taking a lot of years in the process. And i'm not sure they have those kinds of resources at their disposal. For that reason, i think sidefx has a better chance of making houdini's workflow (emphasis here on rigging and animation) a lot smoother and appealing to artists, than modo has of getting to that level of consistent complexity. And consistency across the board is key here. Then again, i might be way off with my thinking Just my 2 cents, Peace, Octav On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Concerning a Modo roadmap, I couldn't share any specifics even if I had them (I don't anyway). I know generally that performance and scalability are way high up on the priority list. If they're not exactly #1, they've gotta be close to it. I think they really do realize the serious obstacles presented by Modo's current trouble with deformer speed, weight-painting speed, etc. The viewport can actually handle a ton of polys really well, by most accounts superior to what Maya can do, but deformers seem to give the GL redraw some trouble. This is a known issue for sure, and the Modo devs are well aware of it. I have definitely been encouraged by the last two releases of Modo. 601 and 701 really hit some home runs. You can't put everything that everyone wants into a single release, but they've got a great track record, especially over the last 2-3 years, of making some real power plays with their upgrades. It's all relative to what your needs are in your particular corner of CG, naturally, but it's an upward trend, and one which will continue with 801 ;-) Softimage and Modo have been two favorite apps to run on my workstation over the last several years, hands down. I see some interesting similarities when I compare
Re: Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement
Sad fucking day. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Nicholas Breslow n...@nbreslow.com wrote: Clearly Autodesk is feeling the heat from the competition. Check out these prices! http://www.daz3d.com/software/daz-studio-4/ I feel like these are the types of discussions that have been taking place at ADHQ lately: Let's make a version of 3DSMax called 3DSMax Design so we can confuse the hell out of our customers! Let's make a version of Maya called Maya LT so we can annoy the hell out of our customers! Let's make a version of Softimage called Softimage 2015 EOL so our customers can tell us to go to hell! Let's make a free character generator!!! I'm pouring out a little bit of my latte as a sign of respect for our fallen brother, Softimage. I hope the list keeps going so I can find out where all you amazing people wind up investing your efforts (I will likely follow you). The lack of creativity in how the death of this truly creative piece of software is being handled is very telling. -Nick *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Christopher Crouzet *Sent:* Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:23 PM *To:* Softimage Mailing List *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement That video is gold! He actually seems disturbed... like if he knew that he was lying. Could totally be used as an animation reference! On 4 March 2014 16:08, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: he looked nervous... On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:01 PM, Dan Yargici danyarg...@gmail.com wrote: While you try and find it, remind yourself of this little gem from not even a year ago! http://area.autodesk.com/2014unfold/products/softimage.html#future -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Redshift3D Render
Hey Andreas, https://www.dropbox.com/s/1rhnxa9cvge0ddc/redshift_forest_dof_unifiedsampling.jpg I only have this as an example, was done during the alpha, and has a couple million polys in it (can't remember the exact number as i don't have the scene in front of me), sss for the leaves, brute force gi with ibl (dome) with dof and vignetting from the render. All instanced ice geo. Took about 7-8 mins if i remember correctly on a gtx470 with 1 gb of vram (ancient stuff) and seemed to handle the thing pretty well. Did not run into any memory issues with that amount of geo but large textures might be a problem for the vram though. -Octavian On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 9:48 PM, Andreas Bystrom andreas.byst...@gmail.comwrote: out of curiosity, has anyone tried a heavy production scene in redshift? somewhere around 100-500m triangles with a bunch of 2k/4k textures? I'm seeing lots of single objects and simple scenes done with it, rendering really fast, but what happens when you throw something heavier at it? -Andreas On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 4:00 AM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Lofted strands aren't quite there yet, but are around the corner. All in all, Redshift really is rocking our little corner of the business. For us, it's been a game-changer. -Tim On 2/16/2014 6:33 PM, Emilio Hernandez wrote: This is just XSI hair, but now it supports also strands. 2014-02-16 18:28 GMT-06:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com: ice strands or just xsi hair? On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.comwrote: Latest release of redshift with hair. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49626349/hair_01.jpg -- -- Andreas Byström Weta Digital -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Photogrammetry - what do you use?
Interesting topic here. Was just testing agisoft photoscan for some non commercial related work, and it seems to give pretty nice results with minimal user input. Has anyone tried to compare a kinekt based approach such as skanect ( http://skanect.manctl.com) with a photogrammetrical approach for object scanning? I am curious about the pros and cons of both. Cheers, O On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 7:36 PM, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote: Recap and 123D Catch from Autodesk do very well with some subject matter. NukeX also has camera tracking, point-could generation and meshing, and can export geo and camera. On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 10:08 AM, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Hello friends, I am currently investigating photogrammetry and would love to get your advices, opinions, experiences with such systems. What hardware do you use? Which software? Best practices? Thank you for any info! MAC [image: cid:image002.jpg@01CDBD94.314AAF40]https://mdc-web-tomcat17.ubisoft.org/confluence/display/technologygroup/Home+Passenger *Marc-André Carbonneau* Product Specialist -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro image001.jpg
Re: Lens Flares in Softimage
Adrian, About the only thing you can do with softimage to help with the flares, is to put nulls where the lights are and export that along with the camera into nuke. Then use a reconcile3d node to convert their 3d pos into xy and attach your flares to that in order to avoid having to manually place them around. Cheers, Octavian On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Matt Morris matt...@gmail.com wrote: Any kind of lighting effects you're better off adding in post, using a couple of isolating passes from soft - light mattes/masks etc. On 20 September 2013 10:04, Adrian Lopez vfxw...@gmail.com wrote: Folks, We've been tasked with building a typical Oscar-type or concert stage. Obviously, glows, spotlight cones and flares are necessary. Been playing with the Softimage flares - but I'm getting horrible results, when they work. Can anyone suggest a suitable approach, in Softimage, to get those light arrays to bring a stage to life? Any ideas appreciated... Adrian -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- www.matinai.com -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email.
Re: Lens Flares in Softimage
Also, keep in mind that Optical Flares have been available for nuke for a while now. The only drawback is that the bundle costs about 60 eur more than the After Effects one. On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.comwrote: optical flare all the way... On 20 September 2013 10:20, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: Same advice, but with optical flare from Video Copilot in After Effects. Le 20/09/2013 11:16, Octavian Ureche a écrit : Adrian, About the only thing you can do with softimage to help with the flares, is to put nulls where the lights are and export that along with the camera into nuke. Then use a reconcile3d node to convert their 3d pos into xy and attach your flares to that in order to avoid having to manually place them around. Cheers, Octavian On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Matt Morris matt...@gmail.com wrote: Any kind of lighting effects you're better off adding in post, using a couple of isolating passes from soft - light mattes/masks etc. On 20 September 2013 10:04, Adrian Lopez vfxw...@gmail.com wrote: Folks, We've been tasked with building a typical Oscar-type or concert stage. Obviously, glows, spotlight cones and flares are necessary. Been playing with the Softimage flares - but I'm getting horrible results, when they work. Can anyone suggest a suitable approach, in Softimage, to get those light arrays to bring a stage to life? Any ideas appreciated... Adrian -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- www.matinai.com -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email.
Autodesk 2014 Extensions Released - Softimage Left Out
Hey guys, A couple of days ago, autodesk officially released its 2014 app extensions. Softimage is missing from that list along with motionbuilder (which is being ported to maya anyway). I don't think i am adding any fuel to the fire. I believe autodesk is doing that. Please don't blame me for opening up yet another chapter of the what the hell is going on with softimage, because it's pretty clear they are shoving it down there with a dedicated mocap app. Checking the autodesk website over and over again pretty much confirms it. No extension for softimage this time. Any ideas as to why? Cheers, Octavian -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email.
Re: Autodesk 2014 Extensions Released - Softimage Left Out
I bumped into a cgchannel article that said, quote: Autodesk has confirmed to us that it won’t be releasing an Extension for either package *this time around*: something that we suspect will be more of an issue for Softimage users than it is for MotionBuilder users. It was that this time around that probably confused me. Oh well, nothing to see here then. On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 6:15 PM, Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com wrote: Where is the rumour police when you need it! ;) On 20 September 2013 16:13, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: No need to unsubscribe ! Le 20/09/2013 17:05, Christopher Crouzet a écrit : My only ideas right now are: - creating a mailing list Blabla and other bullshit about Autodesk marketing so we can move unconstructive posts away from this one while keeping the freedom of speech. - sadly unsubscribing from this list after joining 6+ years ago and having had the pleasure to meet with many of its talented contributors. Which one should I go for? On 20 September 2013 16:44, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, A couple of days ago, autodesk officially released its 2014 app extensions. Softimage is missing from that list along with motionbuilder (which is being ported to maya anyway). I don't think i am adding any fuel to the fire. I believe autodesk is doing that. Please don't blame me for opening up yet another chapter of the what the hell is going on with softimage, because it's pretty clear they are shoving it down there with a dedicated mocap app. Checking the autodesk website over and over again pretty much confirms it. No extension for softimage this time. Any ideas as to why? Cheers, Octavian -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email. -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- To unsubscribe: mail softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with subject unsubscribe and reply to the confirmation email.
Re: Article on Bifrost
For me the problem is not in what it does. (which is everything that the hypergraph/hypershade did and more). When i first heard they were going to create a node editor i said hallelujah...because everyone got fed up using the connection editor for linking stuff. But whenever i stare at it (which is almost daily), it just screams ugly to me. Which is not something that i get with ice or vex for that matter. But it might just be my perception. I am completely aware of what it is and what it does, and i've been using it since it was introduced...i just never felt so at ease with it as i feel with ice. Like having a really powerful yet ugly looking car. I know it's meant to be used by td's and all that, and it doesn't need to look in any way. But when i look at ice, i see something that is both functional and easy on the eyes. Really well thought out visually. That's not something i can say about the current node editor. But i completely understand that for some it might not matter. Octavian On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 12:59 AM, boeingh...@s-farm.de boeingh...@s-farm.de wrote: ** Hey, I'm just doing the advanced rigging course here at anomalia (all in maya) and have learned how great the node editor is. If you want to make connections between objects it's (like you said eric) for the entire scene. So you can build all kind of expressions who live in the scene but not in an ice-operator on an object. Especially for all kind of rigging targets, is really cool to use this editor in place of the outdated SI expression editor or ICE-Kinematics, where you never now what drives what. I would love to see something similar in SI. Andreas Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com hat am 11. September 2013 um 19:24 geschrieben: I think it's an incorrect observation as the Node Editor (different than Hypershade and the Hypergraph) allows you to pull in a lot if not all of the nodes in the scene. Grab a polygon cube and plug it's Y value into this other shader type stuff. It's a node editor for the entire scene not just operators. Much more than ICE is now. On September-11-13 12:23:46 PM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] wrote: Or is that an incorrect observation? -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Übertage travel?
Thanks Leonard. This will definitely help. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.comwrote: Here, all of these hotels have hostel-like prices: http://www.villa-trallala.de/preise.htm http://www.hoteljakobgarni.de/html/zimmer.html http://www.garni-tell.de/zimmer.html http://www.akuna-matata.de/2.html http://www.rosenhof-siegen.de/zimmerpreise.html Hope this helps. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.comwrote: There are really cheap hotels in Siegen. When I looked into it last year I found some for less than 30€ a night. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.comwrote: Heya, I am currently pondering over train / airplane / motorcycle. Haven't made up my mind yet. Will probably leave motorcycle out cuz it's a 4000 km round trip from bucharest to siegen. And i have knobbies on :) What i find odd though, is that i can't find any hostels in siegen...only hotels. Bugdetplaces.com doesn't even recognize the city. And the nearest city for the low cost carriers is Dortmund. Will look into trains later today. Cheers, Octav On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Schoenberger x...@digidragon.de wrote: Hi I am planing my trip to Übertage (and then a week NRW). To just to check: Is anyone driving from Düsseldorf/Neuss? As we probably go to drink some in the evening and the last train takes 3h. Otherwise, I will get a hotel for two nights and drive myself Stuttgart-Siegen and Siegen-Neuss and have some place left. Holger Schoenberger technical director The day has 24 hours, if that does not suffice, I will take the night -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Übertage travel?
Heya, I am currently pondering over train / airplane / motorcycle. Haven't made up my mind yet. Will probably leave motorcycle out cuz it's a 4000 km round trip from bucharest to siegen. And i have knobbies on :) What i find odd though, is that i can't find any hostels in siegen...only hotels. Bugdetplaces.com doesn't even recognize the city. And the nearest city for the low cost carriers is Dortmund. Will look into trains later today. Cheers, Octav On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Schoenberger x...@digidragon.de wrote: Hi I am planing my trip to Übertage (and then a week NRW). To just to check: Is anyone driving from Düsseldorf/Neuss? As we probably go to drink some in the evening and the last train takes 3h. Otherwise, I will get a hotel for two nights and drive myself Stuttgart-Siegen and Siegen-Neuss and have some place left. Holger Schoenberger technical director The day has 24 hours, if that does not suffice, I will take the night -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: Would you like to recover your scene?
Native ascii scene file format. Period. Though we've been asking for it forever now. -Octav On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: My only beef with your plugin is it cannot account for commands which do not log. There’s a good probability the scene your plugin generates is not an accurate representation of what last state of the scene actually was before it crashed. Animation edits, for example, do not log at all. Custom tools flagged to not log, or tools called from self installing commands do not log either. ** ** Back in good ol’ days of XSI v6.x when we were treading water to get anything to function in XSI without exploding, I desperately tried to salvage crashed scenes using a similar technique, but because many commands were not logged it was not possible to salvage work or even rebuild it enough to send to Softimage to diagnose the cause of the crash to get it fixed. Critical missing steps caused the rebuild script to error out, or if it was lucky enough to get to the end without error, the end result was not at all like what it should’ve been. ** ** ** ** Matt ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Andy Jones *Sent:* Friday, September 06, 2013 8:44 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Would you like to recover your scene? ** ** I've said this before, but the script log comes really really close to implementing journalling which is the thing that made filesystems more robust in the 2000's. the binary dump emergency save thing is really kind of a silly way to attack the problem of replaying a journal of operations. If Autodesk realized this, they'd prioritize the completeness of command logging and build a simple toolset for replaying the unsaved operation journal. ** ** I sent my repeatHistory plugin to the beta list a while ago and got crickets. Maybe I'll try again... ** ** All it does is parse the script log for the last open or save operation and them exec the remainder. It would work even better with an event that sets the script log path on scene open/save. On Friday, September 6, 2013, Jeremie Passerin wrote: Got issue with the auto-recover lately, but the scene was actualy properly saved before crashing. just needed to load it manually. http://xsisupport.com/2011/10/15/crash-recovery-in-softimage/ ** ** On 6 September 2013 13:18, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:* *** You're doing it wrong... On September-06-13 4:15:36 PM, Eric Lampi wrote: SoftImage: Hey Eric, I see that you crashed.. How would you like to recover your scene? Eric: Sure that would be great! Go right ahead, bring it on back! SoftImage You'll get nothing and like it! Meh Eric Freelance 3D and VFX animator http://vimeopro.com/user7979713/3d-work ** ** ** ** -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: softimage.tv - Hello World!
Awesome initiative guys. Instant bookmark. Cheers, Octav On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:30 PM, patrick nethercoat patr...@brandtanim.co.uk wrote: Love it. Well done. On 4 September 2013 15:17, Tim Bolland tim_boll...@hotmail.co.uk wrote: Nice looking website, really clean. Also loving the fact my student film was showcased! Was a bit of a shock to see it on there, but I'm not complaining ;p Regards, Tim On 04/09/2013 14:18, Cristobal Infante wrote: Hi All, Would like to announce the launch of softimage.tv created to showcase the best softimage work out there. It's meant to be mainly a video depository but hoping it will also function as a hub for the community. The idea sparked from Andy Moorer's Nike Evolution write up on that Nike job, I thought amazing effort but how do we showcase it a bit more? The list and si-community are great place to discuss soft, but I think a lot users are not on it, not to mention producers, agencies and decision makers. It is still early days so this is a work in progress, we will be adjusting the layout based on the predominant content we receive. This is where eveyone can help us a bit, If you ever created a tutorial for soft, uploaded a test, done an amazing tool, have a showreel to show off, finished a good looking job help us by submitting it. You can directly submit your videos via very simple form in the website (Submit video). All you need to send is a title, vimeo/youtube url, and description. The wordpress will look after the thumbnails, then all we have to do is approve it. Ideally you will be logged in when submitting, so the system will put all videos under your profile. The website was created by myself with the help of Cesar Saez . Would love to know what you guys think about it, and how we can move things foward. Best, Cris -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Animation Visual Effects www.okto.ro
Re: GEAR_mc a fork of Jeremie Passerin's GEAR project
Big thanks to you, jeremie, and the crew at shed for this. It will save lives :)
Re: Showreel 2013
I would just slow down the technical breakdown part - it's a bit too fast to really appreciate what's going on. Been thinking about that, just didn't want to bore people. Should probably redo it at a slower pace. I hope you're wrong about this list not being around for long - I've been on it and previous incarnations for as long as I've been in this profession, which I'm realizing now is 15 years. Seeing it come to an end would be a bit like an amputation. Can't say i feel exactly the same, cuz i haven't been around that long, but it would definitely suck if it were to happen. It's probably all this constant uncertainty when it comes to softimage that's to blame. Rares: Thanks bro. We're probably the only 2 people on this list with romanian names. That's gotta amount to something. Realtime, well, i sometimes try to push opengl stuff into my own personal projects. Also since seeing the short passion did with unity it kinda reminded me of the possibilities. So i'm learning unity as much as i can at the moment, among other things. It's also why i am a bit psyched about redshift. Just finished a project with it and damn, i would not have been able to deliver in such a short amount of time, and with so many iterations, had i used vray / mray or whatever cpu renderer. Now that they added multi-gpu, boy, i can't take the grin off my face. For small teams or lonely freelancers, it's godsent. Xsi parts were the vegetation in the shaolin spot (render only - paint effects geo), the snow in the sub spot, snow in the mountaineer spot, the small car animation, the carousel with the bags, the cube guy, the insect, the guys swallowing the cables, and the bubble-man-thing (for which i had to reverse engineer the mill rig and ice setup). The ship, submarine, helicopter/vehicles, sunflowers, bmw car, glass panels and animals were maya + vray. There are other stuff here and there but it's mostly small stuff (like the houses in the shaolin spot which i modeled in xsi based off location references but then used a projection setup straight in nuke). If i can, on comp heavy projects, i like to avoid leaving the comp environment as much as possible. Most technically challenging project was the sunflower one. Had to deal with a massive number of plant assets (for me at least), all loaded from disk at rendertime, and all of them had a couple of blowing wind variations. It was a small scripting nightmare for me (cuz my genius scripter buddy was on vacation). So what would probably had taken him 3 hours, took me 3 days. Also had to find a way to get the rendertimes down as much as possible, so there was no gi in those shots. Just a well placed domelight and some translucency hacks on the petal shaders. Ended up at 10 mins/frame, HD. Long live vray :) Cheers and thank you for the kind words, -Octavian
Showreel 2013
Hey guys, Been lurking and sometimes chiming into conversations on this list for the past couple of years. Never actually showed anything of what i do. So finally, after realising this list might not be around for long, decided to go ahead and share what i've been up to for the past years. Not really looking for work (even though i'm always open to new opportunities). Simply wanted to get an honest opinion from you guys. Here it is: https://vimeo.com/57945815 On the question of what i did in the shots...well, here's the funny part...mostly everything. I usually work as a one man army, which doesn't make me very employable, but it's been doing me good on the eastern european market (which is where i've been working so far). Plus, i love being able to touch a little bit of everything. I never liked painting myself into a corner. Unfortunately i guess the term jack of all trades - master of none is sadly true. So i handle most of everything (shooting supervision, previz, matchmove, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, lookdev, shading, lighting, rendering, simulations, scripting, comp, matte painting and even grading) - sounds overkill, but it's a small market here, and the requirements are not as steep. I work as a gun for hire, most of the time straight with the production house and i've had to incorporate to be able to pitch against studios around here and get other jobs besides the usual spinning toothbrush and blue detergent balls cleaning the sheets (no one trusts a freelancer with a heavier project). Funny thing is, this can also lead to complications, like having to go to court when the production house fails to pay the royalties on a project and then declares bankruptcy - eastern europe i guess (yeah, it just happened to me). Usually i will also go on location to the production house and use their hardware. Cuts my costs, and makes them feel more secure having direct control over the project. And by then i will have done enough to gain their trust anyway. On the tech side, it's about 50% comp, 50% 3d, with most of the stuff rendered with vray, and some older stuff with mray. The comp is all nuke, with 3d that's probably evenly split between xsi and maya (depending on the project, the production house, sharing assets or not, etc). As a sidenote, i put the valve logo on the insect shots to make sure i give credit where it's due. That is an antlion from halflife 2, and i've used it with permission back in 2004 to do a short film with it, using the source engine. So yeah, those sequences are just comped opengl renders. So is the cube/particle guy that's in there also from a personal short film (which is using mocap). I love realtime stuff. Wish i could use it more in commercial projects. PS. It's funny how i've probably met 5 of you in person, but it feels like i've known everyone for a long time. That's what mailing lists do i guess. Cheers and really looking forward to your input, -Octav -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Visual Exploration www.okto.ro
Re: Wacom tablet in Softimage
Hey Xavier. This has been debated a ton in the past. Using the dll trick works but leaves you without pen pressure (and i honestly like to have that for weight painting). The only solution that works for dealing with heavy scenes playback using a wacom tablet is to use the keyboard and never, ever get that pen close to the tablet while you're doing it. It works 100% all the time. The trick is to take the pen away from it, and just use the playback shortcut keys. When things get heavy, simply use the stop key and watch the miracle at work. Doing this prevents the wacom driver from screwing things up in soft, or soft screwing up the wacom - whichever scenario you prefer. Granted, you don't get the urge to get the pen back on the tablet while you're at it. -Octav -- Octavian Ureche +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2) Visual Exploration www.okto.ro
Re: Mill 98% Human
Amazing stuff. Kudos to the mill team. O
OTish: Neil Blomkamp ELYSIUM trailer
Here is the official trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ-bYOyQ46Yfeature=youtu.be Don't know what to say. Mixed feelings about it. On one hand i am very much looking forward to it, on the other hand it feels like a mix between Deponia, Halo and District 9. And the whole low class hero that saves the world is getting overused. Hope to be wrong. PS. As far as i know, it's the same vfx bunch that did District 9. Image engine, Embassy Weta. Wonder if the embassy handled the mechanical stuff once again. Cheers, O
Re: Softimage 2014
This is actually interesting. Modo seems to resemble a lynch movie...you either love it or hate it. For example, i hate it's selection tools, and the whole workflow seems alien to me. I tried and tried to get the hang of it, but just as i never got along with lightwave, i don't know if i'll ever get along with modo. The weird thing is, i want to like it...but i just can't seem to get to that point. And it's been like that since the days of 101. Still, i have used it on projects with great success, but only for it's beautiful render engine. Everything else seems backwards to me. On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.comwrote: I love Modos selection tools - I think you just need to get used to them. Its neat for modelling and uvs. On 8 April 2013 14:56, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.com wrote: A friend of mine has access to Modo 701, and I was lucky enough to have a look on it until the trial is out. It has very nice things, however, I still hate the selection, and found it quite clumsy compared to Softimage…However, the sculpting toolset is awesome…UV I haven’t tried it yet, next time I visit his studio, I’ll take a look at it too. But to a seasoned Softimage user Modo is a complete another world, and what I felt, that the number of tools and possibilities were rather frustrating then supporting. But of course if I could spend more time on it, I could get used to it. ** ** Cheers ** ** ** ** ** ** Szabolcs ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Martin yara *Sent:* Thursday, April 04, 2013 1:27 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Softimage 2014 ** ** Is not the same thing. We need something to preserve unique frozeb uvs. Maya and Max can do it. When you have assets from other packages, fbx data or old frozen files a custom freeze button doesn't help at all. ** ** I use gator to preserve uvs all the time. Not perfect, but quite useful. And if the object isnt very high poly you can keep the op alive and it works pretty well in real time. boundaries are always a problem but Maya's preserve uv isn't perfect either and doesn't work all he time. It just give you a warning message when the it can't do it (Gator doesn't.) M.Yara On 2013/04/04, at 9:37, Ahmidou Lyazidi ahmidou@gmail.com wrote:*** * And by the way, as I said earlier, if you make a custom freeze button that will only freeze the stack and not the projection, the factory swim feature will preserve the UVs. --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos ** ** 2013/4/4 Ahmidou Lyazidi ahmidou@gmail.com Sorry I mixed it up with the pin feature... Anyway what would be a fair price for a preserve UV feature ? ** ** ** ** 2013/4/4 Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com No it isnt. We just had that discussion. ** ** ** ** -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Is there a new version of GEAR being planned?
This is mostly aimed at Jeremie, but i thought i'd just send it to the whole list because i'm sure a ton of people are interested in what has been happening to it. I am just curios to know if there is a timeframe for 2.0, and if it will ever be released. Just fiddled around with the system some time ago and thought it was really great. Facial tools were also in the works, but i don't think they were ever released? Now things are starting to ramp up, and was looking around for a good rigging system in xsi, and i remembered gear. But going to the dev blog, i noticed the last entry dates back to 2011. Also, the donations page is no longer working. It would be great to set-up a kickstarter or anything to keep supporting it because last i checked, it was a really great toolkit. Cheers, Octav
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Haha, thanx Christopher. That's an old keyboard i dismantled a long time ago. By the way, that site and reel are more than 3 years old now. Have just finished the new reel and while working on the new site was actually thinking whether or not to dump the keyboard thing. On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: I like your keyboard graphic on your web site, very appealing :) Christopher Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com Thursday, April 04, 2013 11:58 AM Can't say anything about Octane because i just toyed with it. But i really enjoyed Keyshot. Even if you can't really do animation rendering with it other than it's built in srt sytem, it's a very fast CPU based raytracer. Very HDRI oriented. Can't remember if it has lights at all. For all i know i always rendered using ibl. But apart from its obvious drawbacks, it's a very simple and effective choice for product designers and the like. Of course, Reshift blows all of that to dust given it's tight app integration and gpu rendering speed. -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com Thursday, April 04, 2013 9:39 AM Well, if I understand correctly, RS does Distributed Monte Carlo, which is a bit different from Octane's Pathtracing. So you're not going to get an apples-to-apples comparison between the two. Now, I have Octane as well, and in my opinion, RS beats it soundly on modest hardware, both in performance and workflow. As others have said, the mere fact that RS is so well-integrated into Softimage is a BIG DEAL. I can't wait for multi-GPU support. -Tim On 4/4/2013 4:12 AM, Doeke Wartena wrote: Doeke Wartena clankil...@gmail.com Thursday, April 04, 2013 5:12 AM How is redshift compared to octane? James De Colling james.decoll...@gmail.com Thursday, April 04, 2013 3:52 AM Welcome to the pro card market... I only use quadros because that's what the sells we use ship with... Long gone are the days when people cards were worth their sticker price olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr Thursday, April 04, 2013 3:26 AM I should be out of the office, but will test asap. For the quadro, well it was bundled with the workstation (HP Z620). It's no problem if the quadro is more expensive and produce better performance. It becomes a problem if they are really bellow game cards. Your gtx has more than 400 cores while the 4000 has 256... They are supposed to be stronger when working though... -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro compose-unknown-contact.jpg
Re: Star Wars demise
Maniac mansion, zak mckraken (which i'm currently playing on the phone), loom, monkey island, day of tentacle, sam max, indiana jones, full throttle, the dig (one of my old time favs) and even the newer ones like grim fandango. Loved them all. That company was a major part of my childhood and one of the main providers of english vocabulary. One could learn so much from those games. Too bad they just went extinct. It's the indie scene that's keeping them alive now, and hopefully that will last longer. By the way. For those fans out there, you can get SCUMM VM to run on your phone (android of ios), and get free roms off the net (free as in abandonware not pirated free). It's actually quite fun even on a small screen. On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:11 AM, Maxime Philippon mphilippon.mailingl...@gmail.com wrote: OMG yes! I remember that game!! :D I really love this one!! On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: Remember 'Day of the Tentacle' game from LucasArts ? Christopher Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net Thursday, April 04, 2013 1:36 PM http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ingame/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-star-wars-1313-fate-unknown-1C9196197 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Max -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro compose-unknown-contact.jpg
Re: Pinnochio 3D characters
When the buzzwork project pinnochio was doing the rounds a couple of years back, everyone thought it was going to be this new revolutionary modular rigging tech. And this is what it turned out to be. On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 1:53 AM, Adam Sale adamfs...@gmail.com wrote: I will say though, Pinnochio's pretty dang slow to update any changes made to characters. On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Exactly my thought… Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com On 4 Apr 2013, at 20:20, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: DAZ 3D ? ... -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Pinnochio 3D characters
Hey Tim, I was simply stating the difference between expectations and final product when it comes to autodesk. For example, taking a look at the kinekt - pinnochio integration, the guy is really excited about it, but looking at the output, i couldn't use that animation in any kind of production, not even a low budget one. Why wouldn't they take an already decent tech like facerobot, and work off of that? On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Why do you guys bash Pinnochio like that? I would have thought that exporting a few characters to *.ma and *.fbx gives a good template to create archviz or nondescript crowd sim folks. You get the male and female rigs that can work as a proportions and size template for populating your scene and already have their motionbuilder setup done for you and ready to drop animation clips onto it. Artistically, sure. It´s not commercials or film ready characters. But technically, I am glad they are there to expand and customize upon. All by myself, I could not go through the whole setup process but I would find it easy enough to swap the geometry with something customized and styled to my personal requirements but keep the rig and snippets and use a generic male and female Pinnochio to lay out the shot already? A few pedestrians here and there, like a flock of birds in an establishing shot. You guys seem used to (Massive/crowdFX) WorldWarZ style levels of expectation, that´s great but a different league of course... Cheers, tim On 05.04.2013 11:20, Jordi Bares wrote: To the point of being not useful, true. Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com mailto:jordiba...@gmail.com On 4 Apr 2013, at 23:53, Adam Sale adamfs...@gmail.com mailto: adamfs...@gmail.com wrote: I will say though, Pinnochio's pretty dang slow to update any changes made to characters. On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.commailto: jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Exactly my thought… Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com mailto:jordiba...@gmail.com On 4 Apr 2013, at 20:20, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com mailto:sebastien.sterling@**gmail.comsebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: DAZ 3D ? ... -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Hey Olivier, Already did that. You can find both versions in the WIP section of the redshift forum, under the topic Animated Classroom with Dof and Moblur. Have fun, O On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 9:54 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: Hi Octavian, Would you share your RedShift scene ? Le 03/04/2013 20:59, Octavian Ureche a écrit : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/**2109634/classroom_sunsky_**animation.movhttps://dl.dropbox.com/u/2109634/classroom_sunsky_animation.mov So here's another test with that classroom scene. This time without dof and moblur but with an abruptly animated physical sun. Looking at the overall render, i think it looks good. I know some will jump and say it's too fast, which is why i'll probably render it again with a slower motion of the light when i get some more time. But so far, i am pleased with the results, and by looking at the first and last couple of frames in the animation, you can notice the solution is stable. Also changed some settings and managed to get 2:30 min/frame on this one. Can't remember when was the last time i had so much fun rendering. -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Here you go: http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-quadro-4000-us.html http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-470/specifications The last one is what i currently have. as you can see, the quadro's memory bandwith, cuda cores and memory interface are below the gtx. But you have bigger vram which means you can cram more into the scenes. Speed wise, given the differences it might be slower at the actual rendering, but we're talking gpu rendering here so i'm not sure if it's going to be that much noticeable. Do a render with both scenes and post your times in the forum. Then we'll know better how hardware affects the performance. To be honest, i always found quadros to be extremely overpriced, but maybe that's just me.
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Can't say anything about Octane because i just toyed with it. But i really enjoyed Keyshot. Even if you can't really do animation rendering with it other than it's built in srt sytem, it's a very fast CPU based raytracer. Very HDRI oriented. Can't remember if it has lights at all. For all i know i always rendered using ibl. But apart from its obvious drawbacks, it's a very simple and effective choice for product designers and the like. Of course, Reshift blows all of that to dust given it's tight app integration and gpu rendering speed. On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.comwrote: Well, if I understand correctly, RS does Distributed Monte Carlo, which is a bit different from Octane's Pathtracing. So you're not going to get an apples-to-apples comparison between the two. Now, I have Octane as well, and in my opinion, RS beats it soundly on modest hardware, both in performance and workflow. As others have said, the mere fact that RS is so well-integrated into Softimage is a BIG DEAL. I can't wait for multi-GPU support. -Tim On 4/4/2013 4:12 AM, Doeke Wartena wrote: How is redshift compared to octane? 2013/4/4 James De Colling james.decoll...@gmail.com Welcome to the pro card market... I only use quadros because that's what the sells we use ship with... Long gone are the days when people cards were worth their sticker price On Apr 4, 2013 4:28 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: I should be out of the office, but will test asap. For the quadro, well it was bundled with the workstation (HP Z620). It's no problem if the quadro is more expensive and produce better performance. It becomes a problem if they are really bellow game cards. Your gtx has more than 400 cores while the 4000 has 256... They are supposed to be stronger when working though... Le 04/04/2013 09:13, Octavian Ureche a écrit : Here you go: http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-quadro-4000-us.html http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-470/specifications The last one is what i currently have. as you can see, the quadro's memory bandwith, cuda cores and memory interface are below the gtx. But you have bigger vram which means you can cram more into the scenes. Speed wise, given the differences it might be slower at the actual rendering, but we're talking gpu rendering here so i'm not sure if it's going to be that much noticeable. Do a render with both scenes and post your times in the forum. Then we'll know better how hardware affects the performance. To be honest, i always found quadros to be extremely overpriced, but maybe that's just me. -- *Tim Crowson **Lead CG Artist* *Magnetic Dreams, Inc. *2525 Lebanon Pike, Building C. Nashville, TN 37214 *Ph* 615.885.6801 | *Fax* 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com *Confidentiality Notice: This email, including attachments, is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient(s). If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage mechanism. Magnetic Dreams, Inc cannot accept liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of Magnetic Dreams, Inc or one of its agents.* -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2109634/classroom_sunsky_animation.mov So here's another test with that classroom scene. This time without dof and moblur but with an abruptly animated physical sun. Looking at the overall render, i think it looks good. I know some will jump and say it's too fast, which is why i'll probably render it again with a slower motion of the light when i get some more time. But so far, i am pleased with the results, and by looking at the first and last couple of frames in the animation, you can notice the solution is stable. Also changed some settings and managed to get 2:30 min/frame on this one. Can't remember when was the last time i had so much fun rendering.
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Haha, we have the exact same video card. To be honest, if things keep going like this, i'll be getting another one used and put in sli. Multi-gpu support is on its way. On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: I feel the same way! The only other place I've had this much fun lighting and rendering is with modo (Preview is awesome!). To be able to iterate over high-quality renders in a matter of minutes with RS is just liberating. And I'm using a lowly GTX 470! -Tim On 4/3/2013 1:59 PM, Octavian Ureche wrote: Can't remember when was the last time i had so much fun rendering. -- Signat -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Vray vs Arnold Displacement
Looking at the mem usage graph it went from 4.03 Gb to 4.53 at the end of the render and then back. Which means around 500 megs. On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Gene Crucean emailgeneonthel...@gmail.comwrote: Here's a quick render with no secondary bounces. 9.87 seconds. Which is closer to your guys tests... # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mb render time: # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mb node init0:00.00 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mbsanity checks 0:00.00 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mb bucket rendering 0:09.86 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mbsubdivision 0:03.26 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mbdisplacement0:01.04 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mbaccel. building 0:00.26 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mbpixel rendering 0:05.29 (multi-threaded render, this value may not be reliable) # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mb system/unaccounted 0:04.08 # INFO : [arnold] 00:00:15 836mb total*0:09.87* (58.62% machine utilization) [image: Inline image 1] Btw, do you guys have any idea how much memory VRay uses for this test? -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Speaking of the wolf Was just getting ready to post it. So here it is: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2109634/classroom_dof_moblur_animation_v02.mov A couple of notes on it though. It had around 3 min / frame (some frames i saw 2:40 min). The thing is, i'm using brute force for the primary rays, since i'm still trying to understand the engine, and it's the slowest approach of all. Also i doubled the rays since the still image to make sure it looks neat (someone mentioned noise for that one), so now it's 1024 rays. Another thing i did was to lower the screen radius to 8 on the IPC and raise the samples per pixel to 64. Kept a pretty low setting on the dof (128 samples), and put a higher sampling on the moblur (512). That's why, if you look frame by frame, you will see some noise in the dof. All in all, given that, with proper knowledge of the engine and a different primary ray approach like IC, one could surely take the rendertime down, i'm still impressed by a noiseless brute force solution that does dof and moblur in under 3 mins/frame. Oh, and i have a 3 year old gtx470 with 1 gb vram. And i just started using redshift yesterday :) Cheers, Octav On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Octavian, is an update/sequence render of the (animated) classroom scene available already? Would be really interesting how the DOF/MoB and GI play together with animation and how long it takes to get the results smooth across frames. Cheers, tim On 01.04.2013 23:37, Octavian Ureche wrote: yap, i have some time to kill tomorrow so i'll give it a go. see know how it turns out On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:29 AM, Andreas Bystrom andreas.byst...@gmail.com**wrote: octavian, could you render a small animation with that exact setup? with say a camera move and some animated objects inside the room? On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Doeke Wartena clankil...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone tell me why so many renderers are CPU based? And what is the up and downside apart from speed. 2013/4/1 Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.ca It is a fantastic render engine. That grain can easily be removed by a little tweaking and not much more render time. - Len On 4/1/2013 12:49 PM, Andres Stephens wrote: Wow, I got access to the Alpha, and I'm really digging it also! But I haven't got a sample scene to benchmark yet. But I like what you've got there, and great times! But.. are you happy with the grain in the image? Thanks for sharing the image. =) -Draise -- From: okt...@gmail.com Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 19:17:32 +0300 Subject: Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.**comsoftimage@listproc.autodesk.com Crossposting and a little OT but i just had to share this. Took some time today and finally fiddled a bit with redshift. 1:41 mins on a gtx470 with the old classroom scene (10 min for material setup, 1 hr to figure out the settings). Dof and motionblur straight from the renderer. I really dig it so far. Cheers, Octav PS.and i managed to finish the vray displacement test scene which i have to cleanup and share later today. [image: Inline image 1] -- __**___ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca -- Andreas Byström Weta Digital -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer
Just to put some salt on that wound...did i mention i was archiving a project and reading my mails while this was rendering? It's the weirdest feeling in the world to render something, and then look at the processor threads and see them all on idle. On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:46 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Very nice. I want to use Redshift3d now, too. mental ray has already wasted too much of my life time. Cheers, tim On 02.04.2013 20:37, Octavian Ureche wrote: Speaking of the wolf Was just getting ready to post it. So here it is: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/**2109634/classroom_dof_moblur_** animation_v02.movhttps://dl.dropbox.com/u/2109634/classroom_dof_moblur_animation_v02.mov A couple of notes on it though. It had around 3 min / frame (some frames i saw 2:40 min). The thing is, i'm using brute force for the primary rays, since i'm still trying to understand the engine, and it's the slowest approach of all. Also i doubled the rays since the still image to make sure it looks neat (someone mentioned noise for that one), so now it's 1024 rays. Another thing i did was to lower the screen radius to 8 on the IPC and raise the samples per pixel to 64. Kept a pretty low setting on the dof (128 samples), and put a higher sampling on the moblur (512). That's why, if you look frame by frame, you will see some noise in the dof. All in all, given that, with proper knowledge of the engine and a different primary ray approach like IC, one could surely take the rendertime down, i'm still impressed by a noiseless brute force solution that does dof and moblur in under 3 mins/frame. Oh, and i have a 3 year old gtx470 with 1 gb vram. And i just started using redshift yesterday :) Cheers, Octav On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Octavian, is an update/sequence render of the (animated) classroom scene available already? Would be really interesting how the DOF/MoB and GI play together with animation and how long it takes to get the results smooth across frames. Cheers, tim On 01.04.2013 23:37, Octavian Ureche wrote: yap, i have some time to kill tomorrow so i'll give it a go. see know how it turns out On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:29 AM, Andreas Bystrom andreas.byst...@gmail.comwrote: octavian, could you render a small animation with that exact setup? with say a camera move and some animated objects inside the room? On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Doeke Wartena clankil...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone tell me why so many renderers are CPU based? And what is the up and downside apart from speed. 2013/4/1 Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.ca It is a fantastic render engine. That grain can easily be removed by a little tweaking and not much more render time. - Len On 4/1/2013 12:49 PM, Andres Stephens wrote: Wow, I got access to the Alpha, and I'm really digging it also! But I haven't got a sample scene to benchmark yet. But I like what you've got there, and great times! But.. are you happy with the grain in the image? Thanks for sharing the image. =) -Draise -- From: okt...@gmail.com Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 19:17:32 +0300 Subject: Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage@listproc.** autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Crossposting and a little OT but i just had to share this. Took some time today and finally fiddled a bit with redshift. 1:41 mins on a gtx470 with the old classroom scene (10 min for material setup, 1 hr to figure out the settings). Dof and motionblur straight from the renderer. I really dig it so far. Cheers, Octav PS.and i managed to finish the vray displacement test scene which i have to cleanup and share later today. [image: Inline image 1] -- _____ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca -- Andreas Byström Weta Digital -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: [OT] Anyone got a working Realflow bin exporter?
Just tried it for a pitch job here. The 2012-2013 addon fails, but the 7.0 one works. Try that one. It will still add all the ice nodes, but i'm not sure what is changed in the newer one. I got the exact same errors with the new one, so my only conclusion is, they haven't tested it enough. Cheers, Octav On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 11:37 PM, Dan Yargici danyarg...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I've downloaded the Softimage - Realflow connectivity plugin to try and export a .bin file from Soft but the addon appears to be incomplete. I get these errors: // ERROR : 2000 - Argument 0 (PresetObj) is invalid // ERROR : 2027-EDIT-AddICENode - Invalid preset argument, cannot load RfBinExportData - [line 555 in C:\Users\dany\Autodesk\Softimage_2012_SP1\Addons\nl_realflow.2k\Application\Plugins\RfXsiScripts.js] // ERROR : 2028-CUST-rf_bin_export_data - Invalid argument specified. rf_bin_export_data(null, null); Line 55 is: var exportDataNode = AddICENode(RfBinExportData, iceTree); and after nosing around is seems there are no compounds whatsoever being installed by the addon. Opening it in a text editor also reveals the same thing. I guess whoever packaged it up forgot to add all the relevant folders! So, does any kind soul out there have a working version they'd like to share (off list) perchance? Thanks! DAN -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez wrote: Redshift 3d
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. On Mar 29, 2013 9:20 AM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez wrote: Redshift 3d
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to the peeps at chaos group for that. Cheers On Mar 29, 2013 4:04 PM, Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca wrote: Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov kamen.li...@chaosgroup.com Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com Friday, March 29, 2013 4:20 AM You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav Christopher christop...@thecreativesheep.ca Friday, March 29, 2013 1:19 AM How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com Friday, March 29, 2013 12:38 AM A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no time. The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa. -- postbox-contact.jpgcompose-unknown-contact.jpgpostbox-contact.jpg
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, No i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Christopher, I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its beta as well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. I cannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i have not touched it since. Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first and foremost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat its solution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs to do a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant for me, as an individual, was that animation was out of the question unless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to wait a long time for the frames to be rendered. Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in an animation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind). This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnold from this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turn takes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do not precompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereas vray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choices to cheat its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which in turn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user. On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershader approach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not use light sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using a special shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked very realistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that time in terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, so you could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things before waiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell fire engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview or vray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature of the engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file), which stored lighting information from all the light sources. That meant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fix everything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. You could dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, and everything would update realtime in it's image editor. I hear now they have a nuke plugin for this. Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver. I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, and it had around 50 lights total. The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights on and off. Had it not been for this feature, i would have been rendering a week on the project. With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozen variations in half an hour from the same render. Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration was not that good nor stable back then. Maybe now things have changed, but last i looked, it was pretty much the same workflow. Cheers, O
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, You are right. Arnold is pretty much looked upon as the magical solution to everyone's rendering problems (i know because i certainly think it too when sh hits the fan with what i use), which tends to become annoying. But i'd love to see a displacement test of both. Unfortunately there's no trial version of arnold yet. What i'm thinking is maybe i could find someone on this list that has a similar proc as mine (i7 3770k 3.5 ghz), and we could share a similar scene with the same model and displacement map, just to get an idea of rendertimes and memory footprint at the same res. If anyone is up for it, send me a mail. I have a couple of days to kill until the next gig.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Well, i thought i made it pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is: vray. Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur, though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't recall if the offer was for xsi or maya. But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly. PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene this weekend. See if we can get any real data. Night,
Re: 2014 New feature list... minor corrections list... you decide
I couldn't help noticing one of the main features on that 2014 list: Realigned Help Menu. This has to be a joke. Otherwise, it's beyond what words can describe. Seriously, is that one of the features after 1 year of development?
Re: Octane render
Hey Tim, To be honest, i think it's because i was lazy, and tried to do the setup as quickly as possible, and instead of tweaking the exposure on the hdri dome, i just cranked up the primary bounce rate to a level that technically yields unrealistic results, physically speaking. I used a 3x primary bounce multiplier when normally you should leave it at 1. That way you exaggerate the lighting in a render making everything that bounces light look overexposed, but you also come across abnormalities like this. Might also be related to the fact that i've somehow managed to rotate the sky dome in such a way that light comes in perpendicular to the side wall, and combined that with the fact that the frames of the windows receive less bounces than the underside of the table, they tend to look less exposed. Might also be related to the fact that i'm using an hdri map for light, and not an actual directional light per se. Might also be that i have no idea why this is happening and i'll just do another render with more accurate settings and see what happens :)
Re: Octane render
That was an lcd? Damn, i thought it was a blackboard of sorts and gave it a greenish tint to make it more interesting. Figures, when u grow up in eastern europe, and you see a classroom...an lcd in front of it is the last thing that crosses your mind. :) On Feb 16, 2013 6:04 PM, Alok Gandhi alok.gandhi2...@gmail.com wrote: Looks very nice. The light shades seems wierdly transparent though and the LCD are too green, maybe you changed the colour. But I like the more contrast. Sent from my iPhone On 2013-02-16, at 10:51 AM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, Here's my take on it with vray in xsi on an i7-3770 at 3.5 ghz (in low priority mode cuz i had work to do in the meantime). Single dome light with an hdri as color texture, 32 light samples. Materials are just vray standards with 32 samples for the glossy reflections no interpolation (it's faster, but i think it is not as accurate). Adaptive dmc with lighcache and irradiance map (glossy rays computed from lightcache - faster), and 3 gi bounces (yeah, i was lazy). 10-15 min setup time. Still noisy, but i wanted to keep it in the 10 mins range, just to see how it might hold up agains the other players. Render is 720p resolution. Cheers, Octav Vray_Classroom.jpg
Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling
This is interesting, and i think it mostly revolves around making certain things clear beforehand. Notice that whenever you do the math based on what an employee's rate would be, you always come up with ridiculously low sums of money from a freelance perspective. At first glance, 100 eur/day to me feels like borderline insulting for a freelance rate. But, if we do a little basic math, at that rate, an employee would get 2k / month, and that includes healthcare and vacation. Which for eastern european standards, is a very good salary. Now as a freelancer, jobs are usually scarce (except if u're on a roll, which i don't think happens that often). So you need to plan your lifestyle accordingly. Backup plans and savings are crucial. Also as a freelancer you have to add extra expenses to your rates, like electricity, renderfarm costs (if u'r pulling heavy stuff that you can't possibly render at home), subcontracting costs (we all need a hand from time to time), rent for the apt you're living in, food, heating or cooling expenses etc. That adds a considerable amount of money to that rate. Something which does not apply to an employee which basically gets all this for free at the working place (apart from food maybe). The studio on the other hand adds these to it's hourly rate, which includes employee expenses. So while in theory, 100 eur/day sounds like a good fulltime salary, for a freelancer, it would give a whole new meaning to life (survival training might be necessary here). Keep in mind, everything i wrote, is based on eastern european experience, but i presume it's the same everywhere else. Numbers vary, but the theory stays the same. Peace, O On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.comwrote: Wow, very nice information. However, there were times, when I was told I am fairly expensive with my 100Euros (without VAT) rate per day...And I'm in Eastern Europe as well, and the statement was made by a company in the UK. Cheers Szabolcs -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of olivier jeannel Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 4:41 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling Thank's Tim :) Pretty precize :D Le 17/11/2012 16:06, Tim Leydecker a écrit : Given you´re mail account, you´re based in France. That´s EU territory. 19% VAT. I guess remote work, home office. Your own equipment, hardware and software. Your own hours plus the above overhead. You guess it would take you 4-5 days to complete the task. Adding 3 revision steps to that means another 3 days of handling your milestones, e.g. communication and revision loops with your client. That´s 7-8 days for finishing a 3 D character model. That´s very fast and seems to not include the concept/art-direction bit too much. Especially when working with a fresh client who may only be able to judge finished, e.g. fully built, textured, shaded and lit renderings. I would suggest a small boutique shop price per day, which is at least around 750 EUR/day. Because that´s what you do, besides modeling. Coming from a graphics design backround, list prices I can relate to range in the 60 EUR/hr range but would not include additional fees for usage of artworks. These fees for, let´s say a worldwide, unlimited use of your character may easily be factor 10. For a reason. Cheers, tim On 17.11.2012 15:24, olivier jeannel wrote: Ah thank's, that helps. Well, the clients seems rather new in the 3d field. (nothing like Lionsgate, or big studio) So I'm not sure how they'll react to the range of price. Thank's a lot for your examples :) Le 17/11/2012 14:58, Octavian Ureche a écrit : I remember doing a commercial for a studio here (eastern europe), and we outsourced a horse model to a friend of mine who now happens to work at lionhead. Point was, it took him 3 days, i recall, to do it, and it cost 1000 euros. And that was 4 or 5 years ago, and it wasn't considered that expensive, and we're talking eastern europe here. Don't know if the prices have changed that much since then in the modelling area, but i thought it might be food for thought. But the guy had an impressive portfolio even back then. On the other hand, i had a friend who recently hired a ubisoft guy with a rather poor portfolio to model a toycar, and he did it for 400 in 4 days. Don't know if it matters whether it's cartoony or realistic, but i think your portfolio will also help dictate the amount of money that you can or can't charge. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 3:02 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr mailto:olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: Ok Thank you ! So, 400$ * 4 or 5 days for 1 character is not over-priced according to you ? Le 16/11/2012 22
Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling
Very good points guys. I can totally relate to the conveying value principle. I met a couple of very successful freelancers in my time, that charged what to me seemed like insane rates, even for an average looking after effects job, just because they knew how to sell themselves and talk business lingo to clients. And they are still doing that, and still getting tons of gigs. On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Daniel H vfxc...@gmail.com wrote: In general, most artists are terrible practitioners of business and pricing. Obviously every model can vary greatly in detail and complexity. Stephen Davidson has it correct by evaluating time per component and then charging by an hourly rate to establish a starting base point. You must also master how to convey value to your client. You can't just spit-out an overall price or a day rate, because this leaves questions unanswered. The client will ask themselves, why this rate, is this high or low in comparison to other artists, what all am I getting for this price, what is this figure based on, how do I know if this is a fair price, can they deliver what I want and on time, do they understand what I expect, what is it going to cost if I want to make changes, etc. Here are some main points you need to cover and convey in the written proposal to your client. 1. I will demonstrate in writing that I understand my client's goals and the results they are after. 2. I will demonstrate in writing that I understand the deadline my client excepts out of me and its importance. 3. I will demonstrate in writing that I understand the quality my client is after. 4. I will demonstrate in writing that my client may make modifications and how those changes will be handled. 5. I will help my client understand the complexity and time this is going to take. 6. I will help my client understand the quality I can provide and/or with portfolio samples. 7. I will help my client understand this project is worth the price because of the above reasons. Because I have learned how to convey a detailed understanding of a project, and how to convey value before presenting high prices to my potential client, is why I beat other proposals 99 percent of the time. You need to price the project based on time, the quality you can provide, and based on its value to your client. Always put yourself in the client's place and ask the questions they would ask, then turn around and answer those questions in your proposal and you will be a bazillion miles ahead of what most artists normally do. Daniel VFXM On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Byron Nash byronn...@gmail.com wrote: Over here in the US I see a lot of people working for in-house freelance rates from home on their own equipment. This seems unwise to me since hardware/software and other costs are not really taken into account. To me, there is a difference between going into a company and working with their clients on their equipment versus working at home on your own setup. I think these trends are creating a false sense of value to clients. In the long run freelancers cannot maintain this economy and the clientele will be accustomed to artificially low rates. On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Szabolcs Matefy szabol...@crytek.comwrote: Yep. I consider the 100 EURO / day as a it’s-just-1 cent-above-to-say-no rate…but I was told it’s way above the average, so it was funny. Especially knowing that how much the client charges for the models I made :D ** ** ** ** ** ** *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Octavian Ureche *Sent:* Monday, November 19, 2012 1:34 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling ** ** Yap, forgot about tax expenses (they changed the legislation here a couple of years ago, and now they roam around 5% for small companies, so one tends to neglect that). Other places have it much higher, from what it seems. ** ** Also forgot to add a very important expense (bad eastern european habit...) that has a very strong influence on rate: software maintance/upgrade costs, and also leasing costs for specialised tools.** ** ** ** As a sidenote, i found out through the years, that sometimes it is better to incorporate than to work as a legal freelacer, as taxes are usually lower this way (5% vs 20% here - insane, right?). But this one may really only apply to this part of the world. Also as a freelancer suing someone is a lot harder (or at least threatening to sue - that one usually does the trick). Plus, getting an accountant and starting to tackle the financial side of a business is a must, as it opens up a world of hurt, knowledge and possibilities which every artist should go through to survive in this industry. ** ** Cheers, Octav ** ** On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:10 PM, olivier jeannel
Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling
I remember doing a commercial for a studio here (eastern europe), and we outsourced a horse model to a friend of mine who now happens to work at lionhead. Point was, it took him 3 days, i recall, to do it, and it cost 1000 euros. And that was 4 or 5 years ago, and it wasn't considered that expensive, and we're talking eastern europe here. Don't know if the prices have changed that much since then in the modelling area, but i thought it might be food for thought. But the guy had an impressive portfolio even back then. On the other hand, i had a friend who recently hired a ubisoft guy with a rather poor portfolio to model a toycar, and he did it for 400 in 4 days. Don't know if it matters whether it's cartoony or realistic, but i think your portfolio will also help dictate the amount of money that you can or can't charge. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 3:02 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: Ok Thank you ! So, 400$ * 4 or 5 days for 1 character is not over-priced according to you ? Le 16/11/2012 22:47, Stephen Davidson a écrit : I would then price it per day. 8 hour days. I charge approx. $400/day (314.2924 euros) On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 3:51 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: I won't be able to be that precise, as I usualy don't count in hours. Thus I think for modelling a 1 character 4 or 5 days is a maximum. But, really I'd like someone to give me a price example. are you usually speaking in hundreds or thousands of euros ? I don't really know... Le 16/11/2012 16:36, Stephen Davidson a écrit : I always estimate per hour. I have found that I can be quite accurate with an hourly estimate by breaking down the modeling to it's most basic components. For example, on a character model, how long to model each eye. How long to model basic body shape. How long to model hands, face, expressions (if needed), clothes... you get the idea. Then, add up all the tasks, and you will have a fairly accurate estimate. It takes practice, as my early quotes were not so accurate. I have been working in 3D since before Softimage version 1 so I have gotten more accurate over the years. On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 4:59 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: Hi guys, Now that I'm starting enjoying playing with Ice and particle stuff, clients are asking for ...modelling job ^^ I realize I never charged separatly for this task alone. So my question is how much do you (freelance, homeworkers) charge for 1 character modeling ? (How much do you keep in your pocket in the end (forget the taxes)) Typicaly, quadrupede / Biped, realistic proportions anatomy but rather for toon / NPA / stylized rendering results. In short, only polygonal modeling, (no Zbrush, no hair) How much do you cost :) -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Semi OT : Charging the modelling
PS. the horse was fairly realistic and had a lot of zbrush love put into it. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Octavian Ureche okt...@gmail.com wrote: I remember doing a commercial for a studio here (eastern europe), and we outsourced a horse model to a friend of mine who now happens to work at lionhead. Point was, it took him 3 days, i recall, to do it, and it cost 1000 euros. And that was 4 or 5 years ago, and it wasn't considered that expensive, and we're talking eastern europe here. Don't know if the prices have changed that much since then in the modelling area, but i thought it might be food for thought. But the guy had an impressive portfolio even back then. On the other hand, i had a friend who recently hired a ubisoft guy with a rather poor portfolio to model a toycar, and he did it for 400 in 4 days. Don't know if it matters whether it's cartoony or realistic, but i think your portfolio will also help dictate the amount of money that you can or can't charge. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 3:02 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: Ok Thank you ! So, 400$ * 4 or 5 days for 1 character is not over-priced according to you ? Le 16/11/2012 22:47, Stephen Davidson a écrit : I would then price it per day. 8 hour days. I charge approx. $400/day (314.2924 euros) On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 3:51 PM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: I won't be able to be that precise, as I usualy don't count in hours. Thus I think for modelling a 1 character 4 or 5 days is a maximum. But, really I'd like someone to give me a price example. are you usually speaking in hundreds or thousands of euros ? I don't really know... Le 16/11/2012 16:36, Stephen Davidson a écrit : I always estimate per hour. I have found that I can be quite accurate with an hourly estimate by breaking down the modeling to it's most basic components. For example, on a character model, how long to model each eye. How long to model basic body shape. How long to model hands, face, expressions (if needed), clothes... you get the idea. Then, add up all the tasks, and you will have a fairly accurate estimate. It takes practice, as my early quotes were not so accurate. I have been working in 3D since before Softimage version 1 so I have gotten more accurate over the years. On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 4:59 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: Hi guys, Now that I'm starting enjoying playing with Ice and particle stuff, clients are asking for ...modelling job ^^ I realize I never charged separatly for this task alone. So my question is how much do you (freelance, homeworkers) charge for 1 character modeling ? (How much do you keep in your pocket in the end (forget the taxes)) Typicaly, quadrupede / Biped, realistic proportions anatomy but rather for toon / NPA / stylized rendering results. In short, only polygonal modeling, (no Zbrush, no hair) How much do you cost :) -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro -- visual | stuff www.okto.ro
Re: Creating a dual polyhedron
you might also want to take a look at this: http://lesterbanks.com/2010/12/creating-a-golf-ball-in-maya-using-geosphere/ cheers
Re: WHATTA HELL???????
So why would anyone care about xsi having ascii scene file description? Wellthis is why. I feel your pain, though trying to recover a scene in this situation, has more to do with luck than anything else.
Re: Softimage sim stop and Wacom
Since 2012 sp1 tablet support has been disabled by default, to fix the annoying lag bug. For earlier versions, you should edit setenv.bat and add this string after @echo off : set XSI_ENABLE_WINTAB_SUPPORT=0 You should also make sure, you have pen cursor feedback disabled in win 7 (use “gpedit” in the command line window and go to User Configuration Administrative Templates Windows Components Tablet PC Cursor) and turn it off. Another way i found to fix this is using the keyboard to start and stop the simulation. This is useful in case you need pressure support in xsi. But never get the pen close to the tablet surface while you do that. cheers, Octav
Re: SiC London last night
Heya, Had a hell of a great time. Initially i thought there were going to be only a handful of people...boy was i wrong. Glad i took the time off work to hop on the plane and get to see everyone i knew but never met in real life. Was well worth it. Also that shot andy gave me...well, it started kicking in at the airport lol Thank you guys, Cheers, Octav (the dude from transylvania) :)
Re: mail...
finally, it's working again...
