Re: Keyboard Mapping - Animation Editor
ha, proper searching helps. great. thanks chris! On 8/17/2012 12:42 PM, Christian Keller wrote: It´s called Fcurve Editor in the Keyboard Mapping menue ;) There´s a entry for isolate curve ! -- christian keller visual effects|direction +49 179 69 36 248 chris3...@me.com Am 17. August 2012 um 09:27 schrieb Andreas Böinghoff boeingh...@s-farm.de: Hey All, this is my first post here. So hello! :) How can I set keyboard Shortcuts for menu entries in the Animation Editor? There is no Animation Editor Group in The Keyboard Mapping PPG and there are no commands logged if I click on for example on the Isolate Curve entry under view. So is there a possibility to easily access the AnimationEditor menu commands? Andreas -- ANDREAS BOEINGHOFF 3D Artist schönheitsfarm production GmbH Co. KG schönheitsfarm hamburg lippmannstrasse 79 22769 hamburg t +4940 432 91 200 f +4940 432 91 222 schönheitsfarm düsseldorf steinstraße 11 40212 düsseldorf t +49211 913 701 0 f +49211 913 701 99 w www.s-farm.de http://www.s-farm.de Geschäftsführung Manfred Brunwey DE 214892548 | Amtsgericht Hamburg HRA 95793
Weight transfer question
Hi Guys, Has anyone any experience in transfering the weight map properties of a deformer to a another object (null) using python?? I am exporting animation and mesh to a Our Engine on the iPad. Created this so far, root = Application.ActiveProject.ActiveScene.Root; for deformer in Application.Selection: nullName = deformer.Name null = root.AddNull( nullName + _bn ) null.kinematics.AddConstraint( pose, deformer, 0) At the moment the character is enveloped to the Deformers and weights have been painted with great detail. When the script creates the nulls based on the deformers to export to the engine with animation, I would also like to transfer the weight map to them automatically so I dont have to reskin. Does anyone know how to do this or where I should start to look Python amature. :) Any help is appreciated. Thanks Kris
Re: Small Annoying Things
One more thing, the inconsistent file browsers. The windows 7 file browser often seems to be standard browser for functions inside softimage. ( browsing to the out put path of a cache for example.) It would be better if all the file browsers were the standard xsi browser. On 17/08/2012 11:48, Matt Lowery wrote: I find the fact that Softimage often makes me doubt my own sanity by saying that the scene I'm about to close has never been saved, even though I saved it just two clicks earlier. Also having just launched Softimage, and gone to the file menu to open a scene, I find it very annoying to have to confirm that I don't want to save the completely empty scene the I'm presented with at start up. This is especially annoying when you are trying to open a scene file that you know will take a good few minutes to open. So you head off to make a nice cuppa only to return and find that the software hasn't even started opening the scene file yet as you still haven't confirmed that you don't want to save an empty scene. G! On 17/08/2012 06:28, Eugen Sares wrote: - File dialog: Would be nice if renaming was possible. A list of available harddrives is missing. Could be a dropdown menu, or a separate, always visible part of the folder tree (the shortcuts button is more like a workaround for this). Am 16.08.2012 23:31, schrieb Votch: This same behavior with modal windows happens in win7 as well and can be very frustrating. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.com mailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com wrote: In Linux modal XSI windows aren't quite modal... You can accidentally click behind them and lose focus, wondering why XSI is unresponsive, only to realise in the taskbar there's a window you have to OK to. And like Xavier said, Copy/paste in Linux ARGHH! Rarely works and when it does it's like two seconds after I trigger a paste. Behavior varies between softwares, too. gedit pastes very quickly but pretty much every other program (like Firefox or SublimeText2) doesn't paste instantly or reliably when having copied from SI. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.ca mailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca wrote: A very simple thing I find annoying. In the file menu, there's a import model, and export model but no replace model. Also when UI windows like the material editor and explorer are opened and set where I want them I wish SI would remember their preferred location for next time. -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 tel:780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca http://www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca mailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca
Re: Small Annoying Things
Am 17.08.2012 12:48, schrieb Matt Lowery: I find the fact that Softimage often makes me doubt my own sanity by saying that the scene I'm about to close has never been saved, even though I saved it just two clicks earlier. Also having just launched Softimage, and gone to the file menu to open a scene, I find it very annoying to have to confirm that I don't want to save the completely empty scene the I'm presented with at start up. This is especially annoying when you are trying to open a scene file that you know will take a good few minutes to open. So you head off to make a nice cuppa only to return and find that the software hasn't even started opening the scene file yet as you still haven't confirmed that you don't want to save an empty scene. G! Good one! Nags me, too, all the time. There's some internal flag indicating if a scene needs saving. This seems to be broken for the longest time now. On 17/08/2012 06:28, Eugen Sares wrote: - File dialog: Would be nice if renaming was possible. A list of available harddrives is missing. Could be a dropdown menu, or a separate, always visible part of the folder tree (the shortcuts button is more like a workaround for this). Am 16.08.2012 23:31, schrieb Votch: This same behavior with modal windows happens in win7 as well and can be very frustrating. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.com mailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com wrote: In Linux modal XSI windows aren't quite modal... You can accidentally click behind them and lose focus, wondering why XSI is unresponsive, only to realise in the taskbar there's a window you have to OK to. And like Xavier said, Copy/paste in Linux ARGHH! Rarely works and when it does it's like two seconds after I trigger a paste. Behavior varies between softwares, too. gedit pastes very quickly but pretty much every other program (like Firefox or SublimeText2) doesn't paste instantly or reliably when having copied from SI. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.ca mailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca wrote: A very simple thing I find annoying. In the file menu, there's a import model, and export model but no replace model. Also when UI windows like the material editor and explorer are opened and set where I want them I wish SI would remember their preferred location for next time. -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 tel:780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca http://www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca mailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca
RE: Small Annoying Things
Try start writing out a characters mdd files within softimage and then start to type an email to someone - especially if the character has lots of small meshes that start writing out. EACH TIME a mesh starts writing the progress bar pops up and takes over from anything else you are doing on the machine - becomes a tug of war to grab focus back to what you are trying to do! LOL. S. _ Sandy Sutherland Technical Supervisor sandy.sutherl...@triggerfish.co.za _ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Eugen Sares [softim...@keyvis.at] Sent: 17 August 2012 15:03 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Small Annoying Things Am 17.08.2012 12:48, schrieb Matt Lowery: I find the fact that Softimage often makes me doubt my own sanity by saying that the scene I'm about to close has never been saved, even though I saved it just two clicks earlier. Also having just launched Softimage, and gone to the file menu to open a scene, I find it very annoying to have to confirm that I don't want to save the completely empty scene the I'm presented with at start up. This is especially annoying when you are trying to open a scene file that you know will take a good few minutes to open. So you head off to make a nice cuppa only to return and find that the software hasn't even started opening the scene file yet as you still haven't confirmed that you don't want to save an empty scene. G! Good one! Nags me, too, all the time. There's some internal flag indicating if a scene needs saving. This seems to be broken for the longest time now. On 17/08/2012 06:28, Eugen Sares wrote: - File dialog: Would be nice if renaming was possible. A list of available harddrives is missing. Could be a dropdown menu, or a separate, always visible part of the folder tree (the shortcuts button is more like a workaround for this). Am 16.08.2012 23:31, schrieb Votch: This same behavior with modal windows happens in win7 as well and can be very frustrating. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.commailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com wrote: In Linux modal XSI windows aren't quite modal... You can accidentally click behind them and lose focus, wondering why XSI is unresponsive, only to realise in the taskbar there's a window you have to OK to. And like Xavier said, Copy/paste in Linux ARGHH! Rarely works and when it does it's like two seconds after I trigger a paste. Behavior varies between softwares, too. gedit pastes very quickly but pretty much every other program (like Firefox or SublimeText2) doesn't paste instantly or reliably when having copied from SI. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.camailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca wrote: A very simple thing I find annoying. In the file menu, there's a import model, and export model but no replace model. Also when UI windows like the material editor and explorer are opened and set where I want them I wish SI would remember their preferred location for next time. -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126tel:780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.cahttp://www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.camailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca
Re: Small Annoying Things
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Matt Lowery ma...@glassworks.co.uk wrote: One more thing, the inconsistent file browsers. The windows 7 file browser often seems to be standard browser for functions inside softimage. ( browsing to the out put path of a cache for example.) It would be better if all the file browsers were the standard xsi browser. +1 to that one ! - Ronald
Re: Weight transfer question
Couldn't you just give the Nulls identical names to the deformers, and then simply load a previously saved envelope ? - Ronald On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Kris Kelly kris.blackno...@gmail.comwrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone any experience in transfering the weight map properties of a deformer to a another object (null) using python?? I am exporting animation and mesh to a Our Engine on the iPad. Created this so far, root = Application.ActiveProject.ActiveScene.Root; for deformer in Application.Selection: nullName = deformer.Name null = root.AddNull( nullName + _bn ) null.kinematics.AddConstraint( pose, deformer, 0) At the moment the character is enveloped to the Deformers and weights have been painted with great detail. When the script creates the nulls based on the deformers to export to the engine with animation, I would also like to transfer the weight map to them automatically so I dont have to reskin. Does anyone know how to do this or where I should start to look Python amature. :) Any help is appreciated. Thanks Kris
RE: Small Annoying Things
If the render tree window is open and one assigns a new material to the selected object the window does not automatically refresh to show the new material Not sure if this is intent or not but I often end up changing the wrong material because I expected my new material to be there everything else is perfect jeff -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eugen Sares Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:42 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Small Annoying Things Hi list, Softimage has one of the slickest interfaces known to man, but nothing's perfect. Let's be nit-picky for a moment... what glitches, small flaws or inconsistencies annoy you most in Softimage? Any SPDL hacks worth doing when SI is installed freshly? This is about polishing, not cool new features (borders are blurry of course). Maybe the new developer team has nothing better to do (ha ha) and feels motivated to do a little mop-up... Here we go: - Render Tree When multiple objects are selected and all share the same Material, the RT should not nag with the message Update can't be done with two objects selected and display that Material. (besides, it says two, even when more are selected) 3ds max can even display multiple shader trees... would this make sense? - Material Manager ...should remember it's layout, expecially the horizontal divider. There's a bug with the text input field of the Shader balls names. It sometimes does not update, and you have to type blindly. After pressing enter it updates, however. - Timeslider When the Range Slider is moved, the timeslider should update with it interactively (does so in Maya). - Project Manager Would be nice if a double-click would open a scene in the list on the right hand side. - Operator Stack A double click on a Construction Mode Marker in the Explorer should activate that mode. Also, highlighting the markers in some way (bold or different color or whatever) would clarify which mode is active in the Stack, besides looking at the dropdown in the menu bar. - Operator Context Menu ... should contain all Commands related to Operators. Now they are strewn across the interface - some are to find in menu Edit Operator, others in MCP Edit Operator. Collapse Operators is a good example. Would you go looking for that in the MCP menu? Freeze in the menu freezes everything below an operator, not the whole stack. Thus it could be named Freeze down or Freeze all below or whatever. - Texture Projection Operator Stack The Texture_Projection_Def property has buttons Reset and Freeze - somewhat hidden. Could reside in the Op Stack context menu as well. - Texture Support ... should show parameters GeoX, GeoY, GeoZ by default. This can be fixed with a litte hack of texture.spdl. I see no reason why it should not be possible to set the size of a TS numerically. I need this often. - Texture_Projection_Def property Checkboxes U,V,W are off by default. Should be on, because when texture coords are outside the 0,0 - 1,0 range, textures render black, and the head-scratching begins. 3D-Coat AppLink for example shifts UVs around that way. - UI graphics The browse icon (...) besides a path input field tends to draw artifacts when the PPG is resized. Could be graphics driver related (GeForce 460 here). Does one need to go for an expensive Quadro card for this? - Render Region Options Use current Pass options should be on by default. Often enough I have drawn an Render Region, tweaked the render parameters in the Render Manager and wondered why nothing happens... More to come... Thanks for reading! Best regards, Eugen
Re: Small Annoying Things
autosave resets the render in progress in the render region, not a big deal, but its annoying when it happens james, On Friday, August 17, 2012, Jeff McFall wrote: If the render tree window is open and one assigns a new material to the selected object the window does not automatically refresh to show the new material Not sure if this is intent or not but I often end up changing the wrong material because I expected my new material to be there everything else is perfect jeff -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com javascript:; [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com javascript:;] On Behalf Of Eugen Sares Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:42 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com javascript:; Subject: Small Annoying Things Hi list, Softimage has one of the slickest interfaces known to man, but nothing's perfect. Let's be nit-picky for a moment... what glitches, small flaws or inconsistencies annoy you most in Softimage? Any SPDL hacks worth doing when SI is installed freshly? This is about polishing, not cool new features (borders are blurry of course). Maybe the new developer team has nothing better to do (ha ha) and feels motivated to do a little mop-up... Here we go: - Render Tree When multiple objects are selected and all share the same Material, the RT should not nag with the message Update can't be done with two objects selected and display that Material. (besides, it says two, even when more are selected) 3ds max can even display multiple shader trees... would this make sense? - Material Manager ...should remember it's layout, expecially the horizontal divider. There's a bug with the text input field of the Shader balls names. It sometimes does not update, and you have to type blindly. After pressing enter it updates, however. - Timeslider When the Range Slider is moved, the timeslider should update with it interactively (does so in Maya). - Project Manager Would be nice if a double-click would open a scene in the list on the right hand side. - Operator Stack A double click on a Construction Mode Marker in the Explorer should activate that mode. Also, highlighting the markers in some way (bold or different color or whatever) would clarify which mode is active in the Stack, besides looking at the dropdown in the menu bar. - Operator Context Menu ... should contain all Commands related to Operators. Now they are strewn across the interface - some are to find in menu Edit Operator, others in MCP Edit Operator. Collapse Operators is a good example. Would you go looking for that in the MCP menu? Freeze in the menu freezes everything below an operator, not the whole stack. Thus it could be named Freeze down or Freeze all below or whatever. - Texture Projection Operator Stack The Texture_Projection_Def property has buttons Reset and Freeze - somewhat hidden. Could reside in the Op Stack context menu as well. - Texture Support ... should show parameters GeoX, GeoY, GeoZ by default. This can be fixed with a litte hack of texture.spdl. I see no reason why it should not be possible to set the size of a TS numerically. I need this often. - Texture_Projection_Def property Checkboxes U,V,W are off by default. Should be on, because when texture coords are outside the 0,0 - 1,0 range, textures render black, and the head-scratching begins. 3D-Coat AppLink for example shifts UVs around that way. - UI graphics The browse icon (...) besides a path input field tends to draw artifacts when the PPG is resized. Could be graphics driver related (GeForce 460 here). Does one need to go for an expensive Quadro card for this? - Render Region Options Use current Pass options should be on by default. Often enough I have drawn an Render Region, tweaked the render parameters in the Render Manager and wondered why nothing happens... More to come... Thanks for reading! Best regards, Eugen
Re: Small Annoying Things
Am 17.08.2012 15:42, schrieb Jeff McFall: If the render tree window is open and one assigns a new material to the selected object the window does not automatically refresh to show the new material Not sure if this is intent or not but I often end up changing the wrong material because I expected my new material to be there +1 Even asked VRay support two days ago if this is related to the connection plugin, but no, it's a SI bug. everything else is perfect jeff -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eugen Sares Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:42 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Small Annoying Things Hi list, Softimage has one of the slickest interfaces known to man, but nothing's perfect. Let's be nit-picky for a moment... what glitches, small flaws or inconsistencies annoy you most in Softimage? Any SPDL hacks worth doing when SI is installed freshly? This is about polishing, not cool new features (borders are blurry of course). Maybe the new developer team has nothing better to do (ha ha) and feels motivated to do a little mop-up... Here we go: - Render Tree When multiple objects are selected and all share the same Material, the RT should not nag with the message Update can't be done with two objects selected and display that Material. (besides, it says two, even when more are selected) 3ds max can even display multiple shader trees... would this make sense? - Material Manager ...should remember it's layout, expecially the horizontal divider. There's a bug with the text input field of the Shader balls names. It sometimes does not update, and you have to type blindly. After pressing enter it updates, however. - Timeslider When the Range Slider is moved, the timeslider should update with it interactively (does so in Maya). - Project Manager Would be nice if a double-click would open a scene in the list on the right hand side. - Operator Stack A double click on a Construction Mode Marker in the Explorer should activate that mode. Also, highlighting the markers in some way (bold or different color or whatever) would clarify which mode is active in the Stack, besides looking at the dropdown in the menu bar. - Operator Context Menu ... should contain all Commands related to Operators. Now they are strewn across the interface - some are to find in menu Edit Operator, others in MCP Edit Operator. Collapse Operators is a good example. Would you go looking for that in the MCP menu? Freeze in the menu freezes everything below an operator, not the whole stack. Thus it could be named Freeze down or Freeze all below or whatever. - Texture Projection Operator Stack The Texture_Projection_Def property has buttons Reset and Freeze - somewhat hidden. Could reside in the Op Stack context menu as well. - Texture Support ... should show parameters GeoX, GeoY, GeoZ by default. This can be fixed with a litte hack of texture.spdl. I see no reason why it should not be possible to set the size of a TS numerically. I need this often. - Texture_Projection_Def property Checkboxes U,V,W are off by default. Should be on, because when texture coords are outside the 0,0 - 1,0 range, textures render black, and the head-scratching begins. 3D-Coat AppLink for example shifts UVs around that way. - UI graphics The browse icon (...) besides a path input field tends to draw artifacts when the PPG is resized. Could be graphics driver related (GeForce 460 here). Does one need to go for an expensive Quadro card for this? - Render Region Options Use current Pass options should be on by default. Often enough I have drawn an Render Region, tweaked the render parameters in the Render Manager and wondered why nothing happens... More to come... Thanks for reading! Best regards, Eugen
Re: Weight transfer question
Cheers Ronald. I may be wrong.. but I think it would be better if the new nulls created became part of the character/scene rather than generated every time character export to engine. Kris On 17 Aug 2012, at 14:40, Toonafish wrote: Couldn't you just give the Nulls identical names to the deformers, and then simply load a previously saved envelope ? - Ronald On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Kris Kelly kris.blackno...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone any experience in transfering the weight map properties of a deformer to a another object (null) using python?? I am exporting animation and mesh to a Our Engine on the iPad. Created this so far, root = Application.ActiveProject.ActiveScene.Root; for deformer in Application.Selection: nullName = deformer.Name null = root.AddNull( nullName + _bn ) null.kinematics.AddConstraint( pose, deformer, 0) At the moment the character is enveloped to the Deformers and weights have been painted with great detail. When the script creates the nulls based on the deformers to export to the engine with animation, I would also like to transfer the weight map to them automatically so I dont have to reskin. Does anyone know how to do this or where I should start to look Python amature. :) Any help is appreciated. Thanks Kris
Re: Weight transfer question
*Couldn't you just give the Nulls identical names to the deformers, and then simply load a previously saved envelope ?* That's exactly what the script is doing Alok.
RE: Friday Flashback
Friday Flashback 83 2000 - Softimage hit the ground running with XSI a beautifully constructed environment to work in http://wp.me/powV4-232 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alan Fregtman Sent: August-10-12 10:52 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Friday Flashback Oh my Darwin, SO much red! My yeess On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Stephen Blair stephen.bl...@autodesk.commailto:stephen.bl...@autodesk.com wrote: Friday Flashback #82 XSI's first SIGGRAPH http://wp.me/powV4-22f 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 Stephen Blair Sent: August-03-12 10:44 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Friday Flashback Friday Flashback 81 From 2004, Softimage XSI the perfect fit: - Everything you need - Everything you want - Everything there is http://wp.me/powV4-21j From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane Sent: July-30-12 4:00 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Friday Flashback I think Olivier can still be seen shuddering when Batchserve is mentioned in his vicinity :) On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 4:58 AM, Stephen Blair stephen.bl...@autodesk.commailto:stephen.bl...@autodesk.commailto:stephen.bl...@autodesk.commailto:stephen.bl...@autodesk.com wrote: Friday Flashback #80 BatchServe 1.5 the Experience http://wp.me/powV4-1YW attachment: winmail.dat
Re: Weight transfer question
Yeah this should be a part of a standard rigging workflow. It has been long since I rigged, but when I was doing it I always kept nulls as deformers constrained to other parts of the rig. This way you always have a clean layer in your rig with just meshes and deformers. It then becomes very easy to plot all the deformer nulls and remove all constraints. The rig is then simply meshes with deformer having animation on them. It specially helps to export to other DCC apps without any pains.
Re: [ICE] Get UVs of GroupMembers
You can use a First Valid node to stop the compound from going red when no UVs are found. As far as I'm aware you cannot escape the thing about having your projections all named the same. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Vincent Ullmann vincent.ullm...@googlemail.com wrote: Hello, got another ICE-Problem... i try to do some Topology and UV Merging-Stuff and now need to get the UV-Sets of my Meshes in a Group. Have a little look at the attacted Picture It works when all Texture-Projections got the same Name, but thats not what i want, becouse i... - want to alow Meshes without any UV-Set - want to create a tool wich is usable for Artist who dont think much about the internal issues. :) - want to make my compound as easy to use as possible Currently I got a quite annoying solution: I wrote a script wich Applys my ICE-Tree, and plugs all GroupMembers, one by one, into my big Compound. (Using something like you see in the Green-GroupCommmentBox) It works, but i would really appreciate another solution, so that one could easy add Members to the group and my ICE-Tree will automaticly update the UV-Value-Array. Any suggestions?
Re: Small Annoying Things
Is the new dev team making a list out of this? This list is gold. I'd absolutely love to see this kind of stuff addressed in 2014. -Paul On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Eugen Sares softim...@keyvis.at wrote: Am 17.08.2012 15:42, schrieb Jeff McFall: If the render tree window is open and one assigns a new material to the selected object the window does not automatically refresh to show the new material Not sure if this is intent or not but I often end up changing the wrong material because I expected my new material to be there +1 Even asked VRay support two days ago if this is related to the connection plugin, but no, it's a SI bug. everything else is perfect jeff -Original Message- From: softimage-bounces@listproc.**autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com[mailto: softimage-bounces@**listproc.autodesk.comsoftimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eugen Sares Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:42 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.**com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Small Annoying Things Hi list, Softimage has one of the slickest interfaces known to man, but nothing's perfect. Let's be nit-picky for a moment... what glitches, small flaws or inconsistencies annoy you most in Softimage? Any SPDL hacks worth doing when SI is installed freshly? This is about polishing, not cool new features (borders are blurry of course). Maybe the new developer team has nothing better to do (ha ha) and feels motivated to do a little mop-up... Here we go: - Render Tree When multiple objects are selected and all share the same Material, the RT should not nag with the message Update can't be done with two objects selected and display that Material. (besides, it says two, even when more are selected) 3ds max can even display multiple shader trees... would this make sense? - Material Manager ...should remember it's layout, expecially the horizontal divider. There's a bug with the text input field of the Shader balls names. It sometimes does not update, and you have to type blindly. After pressing enter it updates, however. - Timeslider When the Range Slider is moved, the timeslider should update with it interactively (does so in Maya). - Project Manager Would be nice if a double-click would open a scene in the list on the right hand side. - Operator Stack A double click on a Construction Mode Marker in the Explorer should activate that mode. Also, highlighting the markers in some way (bold or different color or whatever) would clarify which mode is active in the Stack, besides looking at the dropdown in the menu bar. - Operator Context Menu ... should contain all Commands related to Operators. Now they are strewn across the interface - some are to find in menu Edit Operator, others in MCP Edit Operator. Collapse Operators is a good example. Would you go looking for that in the MCP menu? Freeze in the menu freezes everything below an operator, not the whole stack. Thus it could be named Freeze down or Freeze all below or whatever. - Texture Projection Operator Stack The Texture_Projection_Def property has buttons Reset and Freeze - somewhat hidden. Could reside in the Op Stack context menu as well. - Texture Support ... should show parameters GeoX, GeoY, GeoZ by default. This can be fixed with a litte hack of texture.spdl. I see no reason why it should not be possible to set the size of a TS numerically. I need this often. - Texture_Projection_Def property Checkboxes U,V,W are off by default. Should be on, because when texture coords are outside the 0,0 - 1,0 range, textures render black, and the head-scratching begins. 3D-Coat AppLink for example shifts UVs around that way. - UI graphics The browse icon (...) besides a path input field tends to draw artifacts when the PPG is resized. Could be graphics driver related (GeForce 460 here). Does one need to go for an expensive Quadro card for this? - Render Region Options Use current Pass options should be on by default. Often enough I have drawn an Render Region, tweaked the render parameters in the Render Manager and wondered why nothing happens... More to come... Thanks for reading! Best regards, Eugen
OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul
Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
I haven't tried Windows 8, yet, but I do have Windows 7 64 bit Pro. My machine was acting flaky, also, so I reformatted the drive and re-installed Windows and all my APPS. It took me an entire day, with all the Windows updates, and drivers, but it was worth it. Much more stable, now. I had heard that Windows 8 was geared heavily for touch screens, so I haven't even considered it. I can't see me getting a 32 touch screen, and I would need a chiropractor after reaching across my desk to the screen all day. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
Check out the Wacom Intuos 5 Touch tablets, should work great with Win8, I use it with Win7 and OSX. I too don't intend to grab at my monitor all day but with the Wacom it's quite natural. My only gripe is, that it doesn't act like a tablet with absolute coordinates (where you touch is where your pointer is) but like a mouse or laptop touch pad. That also makes multitouch less useful, but I still am very happy with it, after my old one broke. Cheers, Tom On 17 August 2012 19:21, Rob Wuijster r...@casema.nl wrote: I've tested W8RP on my old HP laptop, and so far almost all apps did run just fine. The Metro/Modern startscreen and the sliding panels/hotcorners need some getting used to. But it seems to be quite a bit faster with a lot of things than W7, booting espc. Memory management seems to be up a notch as well. I didn't have much problems regarding stability. There were some stability issues reported with certain i7 mobo's during the latest W8RP, but that seems to be solved with the more recent drivers. And yes, it's a lot more touch centric than all previous versions of Windows, but that doesn't mean it's not workable with a mouse or tablet. Rob \/-\/\/ On 17-8-2012 18:47, Stephen Davidson wrote: I haven't tried Windows 8, yet, but I do have Windows 7 64 bit Pro. My machine was acting flaky, also, so I reformatted the drive and re-installed Windows and all my APPS. It took me an entire day, with all the Windows updates, and drivers, but it was worth it. Much more stable, now. I had heard that Windows 8 was geared heavily for touch screens, so I haven't even considered it. I can't see me getting a 32 touch screen, and I would need a chiropractor after reaching across my desk to the screen all day. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5205 - Release Date: 08/17/12
Re: Small Annoying Things
We have a pretty nice stereo camera but can't capture right and left eyes for stereo captures, necessitating creating duplicate constrained cameras for L and R eyes solely for capture/playblasts. Sent from my iPad On Aug 16, 2012, at 8:41 AM, Eugen Sares softim...@keyvis.at wrote: Hi list, Softimage has one of the slickest interfaces known to man, but nothing's perfect. Let's be nit-picky for a moment... what glitches, small flaws or inconsistencies annoy you most in Softimage? Any SPDL hacks worth doing when SI is installed freshly? This is about polishing, not cool new features (borders are blurry of course). Maybe the new developer team has nothing better to do (ha ha) and feels motivated to do a little mop-up... Here we go: - Render Tree When multiple objects are selected and all share the same Material, the RT should not nag with the message Update can't be done with two objects selected and display that Material. (besides, it says two, even when more are selected) 3ds max can even display multiple shader trees... would this make sense? - Material Manager ...should remember it's layout, expecially the horizontal divider. There's a bug with the text input field of the Shader balls names. It sometimes does not update, and you have to type blindly. After pressing enter it updates, however. - Timeslider When the Range Slider is moved, the timeslider should update with it interactively (does so in Maya). - Project Manager Would be nice if a double-click would open a scene in the list on the right hand side. - Operator Stack A double click on a Construction Mode Marker in the Explorer should activate that mode. Also, highlighting the markers in some way (bold or different color or whatever) would clarify which mode is active in the Stack, besides looking at the dropdown in the menu bar. - Operator Context Menu ... should contain all Commands related to Operators. Now they are strewn across the interface - some are to find in menu Edit Operator, others in MCP Edit Operator. Collapse Operators is a good example. Would you go looking for that in the MCP menu? Freeze in the menu freezes everything below an operator, not the whole stack. Thus it could be named Freeze down or Freeze all below or whatever. - Texture Projection Operator Stack The Texture_Projection_Def property has buttons Reset and Freeze - somewhat hidden. Could reside in the Op Stack context menu as well. - Texture Support ... should show parameters GeoX, GeoY, GeoZ by default. This can be fixed with a litte hack of texture.spdl. I see no reason why it should not be possible to set the size of a TS numerically. I need this often. - Texture_Projection_Def property Checkboxes U,V,W are off by default. Should be on, because when texture coords are outside the 0,0 - 1,0 range, textures render black, and the head-scratching begins. 3D-Coat AppLink for example shifts UVs around that way. - UI graphics The browse icon (...) besides a path input field tends to draw artifacts when the PPG is resized. Could be graphics driver related (GeForce 460 here). Does one need to go for an expensive Quadro card for this? - Render Region Options Use current Pass options should be on by default. Often enough I have drawn an Render Region, tweaked the render parameters in the Render Manager and wondered why nothing happens... More to come... Thanks for reading! Best regards, Eugen
Graphic card for a workstation again
Trying to decide on a graphic card for a workstation. I was doing some research, there is suppose to be a good discussion in the XSIbase forum but the site comes up with a virus warning. Any thought on the list of cards?. Normally I would stay with the Nvidia but I have read good things about the AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 We are using Nvdia GTX 260 right now and it works fine but would like to upgrade for the next workstation. $400 to $600 CAN Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 $200 to $250 CAN NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1.0GB DDR3 PCI-E16 DVI Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card Nvidia GTX 550TI, 560, 570, 580 Thanks, Leoung
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
I always go here for GPU and CPU benchmarks. It is great because they also have the price/performance ratio: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html -ben On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.com wrote: Trying to decide on a graphic card for a workstation. I was doing some research, there is suppose to be a good discussion in the XSIbase forum but the site comes up with a virus warning. Any thought on the list of cards?. Normally I would stay with the Nvidia but I have read good things about the AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 We are using Nvdia GTX 260 right now and it works fine but would like to upgrade for the next workstation. $400 to $600 CAN Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 $200 to $250 CAN NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1.0GB DDR3 PCI-E16 DVI Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card Nvidia GTX 550TI, 560, 570, 580 Thanks, Leoung -- Best regards, Ben Houston Voice: 613-762-4113 Skype: ben.exocortex Twitter: @exocortexcom http://Exocortex.com - Passionate CG Software Professionals.
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
A lot of people that were testing on XSIbase were getting drastically better performance from the ATI cards (about 2x-3x) and the point selection problem seemed to be gone. The latest Nvidia GTX cards (after the 2xx series) seem to be intentionally hobbled. The conclusion on the XSIbase forum seemed heavily in favor of the ATI. On 8/17/2012 12:36 PM, Leoung O'Young wrote: Trying to decide on a graphic card for a workstation. I was doing some research, there is suppose to be a good discussion in the XSIbase forum but the site comes up with a virus warning. Any thought on the list of cards?. Normally I would stay with the Nvidia but I have read good things about the AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 We are using Nvdia GTX 260 right now and it works fine but would like to upgrade for the next workstation. $400 to $600 CAN Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 $200 to $250 CAN NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1.0GB DDR3 PCI-E16 DVI Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card Nvidia GTX 550TI, 560, 570, 580 Thanks, Leoung -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.ca
Re: Excluding objects in lightmap rendering stage
Yes. But the idea is 1/ not use disk. Keep all lightmaps data in memory, for avoiding saves, loads and other disk related problems. 2/ simplify the scene setup at the maximum. The custom shader shlould be as robust and simple to use. It would be heavy for the workflow here at the studio to add another pass more. 2012/8/15 Vladimir Jankijevic vladi...@elefantstudios.ch what I meant would only work in two passes. First render a sequence of all the lightmaps (cache them) into .map files on disk. And then in a second pass read them back in without recreating them. On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Rémi Arquier arqu...@gmail.com wrote: What do you mean by precaching the whole scene ? However if there is a way to hide the pointclouds in the lightmap stage and unhidding them in the tile rendering stage it would be perfect. (all this in a single pass). 2012/8/14 Vladimir Jankijevic vladi...@elefantstudios.ch why don't you precache the whole scene or animation with the pointcloud hidden and then read back in the lightmaps on the final rendering? On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Rémi Arquier arqu...@gmail.comwrote: To be sure to be well understood, imagine a scene, composed of a sphere with a ICE Cloud Particle around the sphere. The lightmap shader is only attached to the sphere (not to the ICE Cloud). When the lightmap compute his illumination, it casts shadow rays (and / or secondary rays depending of the sphere material), those rays hit the ICE Cloud Particle, and MR call the ICE Cloud Particle's geoshader / material for each ray. Even if I can put a completely transparent shadow shader on the ICE Cloud, which solve the problem of the color illumination, those calls are time consuming : the lightmap computation is more than 1000 slower when the ICE Particle is present. So yes, maybe if I could put a custom attribute (like the classic visibility flags) on ICE Clouds which tells to MR to simply ignore them when casting ray in lightmap stage (the rays would traverse them as they wouldn't exist), it would be perfect, but I don't know how to do it. But I am not sure, maybe I ask something that the translator or even MR don't allow ? Rémi 2012/8/14 Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.com What I would do is to have your lightmap algorithm look up for an custom attribute in the scene and see what needs to be eliminated from computation?! This would be a hack to solve your unique rendering requirement ;) Chris On 14 Aug, 2012, at 9:55 PM, Rémi ARQUIER arqu...@gmail.commailto: arqu...@gmail.com wrote: You are right, the ICE Particles cloud are not evaluated for the lightmaps (they don't affect lightmap illuminaton). I would want to compute the lightmaps and the final rendering in just one click on render. Not using two passes. Lets say that mental ray in one click on render button decompose the global rendering into two consecutive stages : Stage 1 - Lightmap computation. The lightmaps, applied on polygon meshes compute some custom user data (whatever) and store them into ram. Stage 2 - Tile Rendering. Other shaders read the custom user data from ram and use it for final illumination of the ICE Particle Clouds. In stage 1, the ICE Particle cloud *must not* be presents for casting ray speed optimization. In stage 2, the ICE Particle cloud *need* to be present since they are visible by all rays. 2012/8/14 Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.commailto: chris.c...@autodesk.com My qn is: why does your point cloud need to exist in your 'light map' pass? Do you mean that the point cloud still needs to be rendered but not evaluated for light map? Clear my doubt... Chris On 14 Aug, 2012, at 8:39 PM, Rémi ARQUIER arqu...@gmail.commailto: arqu...@gmail.commailto:arqu...@gmail.commailto:arqu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Chris Breaking the scene into two passes would solve that specific problem but : 1/ Our custom lightmap shader creates custom data (mental ray point clouds, not maps) and keep them into ram. It would be inefficient to save them then reload them using hard disk. 2/ We already use passes in our workflow and it would complicate it to add other ones just for a shader. We need something transparent in the user side. 2012/8/14 Chris Chia chris.c...@autodesk.commailto: chris.c...@autodesk.commailto:chris.c...@autodesk.commailto: chris.c...@autodesk.com Why can't you break your scene into passes? With the point cloud hidden in the light map pass? Chris On 13 Aug, 2012, at 10:20 PM, Rémi ARQUIER arqu...@gmail.com mailto:arqu...@gmail.commailto:arqu...@gmail.commailto: arqu...@gmail.com wrote: Hi list I would like to know if it is possible to exclude objects in the ligtmap rendering stage. Specificaly I would like that some of ICE particle clouds not be seen by object beeing sampled (for reflection rays and shadow rays for example). I have tried combining a mip_rayswitch_stage plus a transparent
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Hi Len, thanks for your input. On 8/17/2012 3:24 PM, Len Krenzler wrote: A lot of people that were testing on XSIbase were getting drastically better performance from the ATI cards (about 2x-3x) and the point selection problem seemed to be gone. The latest Nvidia GTX cards (after the 2xx series) seem to be intentionally hobbled. The conclusion on the XSIbase forum seemed heavily in favor of the ATI. On 8/17/2012 12:36 PM, Leoung O'Young wrote: Trying to decide on a graphic card for a workstation. I was doing some research, there is suppose to be a good discussion in the XSIbase forum but the site comes up with a virus warning. Any thought on the list of cards?. Normally I would stay with the Nvidia but I have read good things about the AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 We are using Nvdia GTX 260 right now and it works fine but would like to upgrade for the next workstation. $400 to $600 CAN Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 $200 to $250 CAN NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1.0GB DDR3 PCI-E16 DVI Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card Nvidia GTX 550TI, 560, 570, 580 Thanks, Leoung -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.ca -l...@creativecontrol.ca
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
No issues here. I was one of radeon 7970 testers and can confirm all the best about it. I replaced gtx 580 where I had with an script (rotating cube 831x800x800 subdivs in full screen shaded) approx 17fps and after like 30 esec of rotation goin gup to 80fps, and right after I replaced it with radeon 7970 fps jumped to 170fps, no lag at all. Huge improovement over nvidia, plus support for 4 monitors does come handy as well (running all 4 of them without problems) I can only highly recommend ati over any nvidia card now. gtx cards seems crippled completely gfor SI, and quadros are waaay more expensive and still I got better results then some quadro cards when we run some tests here on list couple months ago. good luck :)
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Hi Mirko, What brand name Radeon 7970 do you have? Thanks, Leoung On 8/17/2012 3:47 PM, Mirko Jankovic wrote: No issues here. I was one of radeon 7970 testers and can confirm all the best about it. I replaced gtx 580 where I had with an script (rotating cube 831x800x800 subdivs in full screen shaded) approx 17fps and after like 30 esec of rotation goin gup to 80fps, and right after I replaced it with radeon 7970 fps jumped to 170fps, no lag at all. Huge improovement over nvidia, plus support for 4 monitors does come handy as well (running all 4 of them without problems) I can only highly recommend ati over any nvidia card now. gtx cards seems crippled completely gfor SI, and quadros are waaay more expensive and still I got better results then some quadro cards when we run some tests here on list couple months ago. good luck :)
RE: Graphic card for a workstation again
Hi Mirko, do you have any redraw problems / display glitches in the animation editor when running multi monitors? (openGL on a second monitor was a problem I had with earlier ATI cards.) And may I ask which version of soft do you use? Sven From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Mirko Jankovic Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 21:47 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Graphic card for a workstation again No issues here. I was one of radeon 7970 testers and can confirm all the best about it. I replaced gtx 580 where I had with an script (rotating cube 831x800x800 subdivs in full screen shaded) approx 17fps and after like 30 esec of rotation goin gup to 80fps, and right after I replaced it with radeon 7970 fps jumped to 170fps, no lag at all. Huge improovement over nvidia, plus support for 4 monitors does come handy as well (running all 4 of them without problems) I can only highly recommend ati over any nvidia card now. gtx cards seems crippled completely gfor SI, and quadros are waaay more expensive and still I got better results then some quadro cards when we run some tests here on list couple months ago. good luck :)
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
http://www.guru3d.com/news/gigabyte-radeon-hd-7970-oc-windforce-review/ Sorry for link to review but forgot full model number to look for it on gigabyte page. That is card. No glitches at all, I usually have main screen middle monitor ofc, animation editor on right and bunch of other smaller windows on left monitor, like scene explorer etc. Haven't seen a single issue so far. SI 2012 SAP, but tested a bit on 2013 as well and same thing. Only thing I was disappointed about this model is that they didn't include any mini DV - DVI adapters and you need to have active adapters to be able to use eyefinity for 3 and more monitors. But got mine on ebay so no problem there really.
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Also if you are interested here are some OpenCL results between gtx680 and ati 7970: Originally Posted by *Raycat* I ran the Luxmark 2.0 Open CL benchmark. These are the results on my AsUs GTX 680 2 GB (NOT OC'ed): Room: 275 Sala: 605 Luxball HDR: 3925 Luxball: 689 Luxball Sky: 2358 Luxmark 2.0 Open CL benchmark on Radeon HD7970: Room: 585 Sala: 1016 Luxball HDR: 9076 Luxball: 1143 Luxball Sky: 4221 copy paste from this forum on cgtalk: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=23t=1048529page=2pp=15
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Ati 7870 with lastest beta driver+ 30”hp + 27”dell, no problems so far I replaced gtx285 with this radeon the ‘cube test’ runs at 150+ fps, wireframe on heavy models seems to run much faster than nvidia My Zbrush head test (8 million tris) runs at 290+fps vs 25 fps on 285. but with scenes with 500+ objects I see no difference between this radeon and 285. if you have any specific glitchbug to test let me know, Ill check if its present. From: Sven Constable Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 10:06 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Graphic card for a workstation again Hi Mirko, do you have any redraw problems / display glitches in the animation editor when running multi monitors? (openGL on a second monitor was a problem I had with earlier ATI cards…) And may I ask which version of soft do you use? Sven From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Mirko Jankovic Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 21:47 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Graphic card for a workstation again No issues here. I was one of radeon 7970 testers and can confirm all the best about it. I replaced gtx 580 where I had with an script (rotating cube 831x800x800 subdivs in full screen shaded) approx 17fps and after like 30 esec of rotation goin gup to 80fps, and right after I replaced it with radeon 7970 fps jumped to 170fps, no lag at all. Huge improovement over nvidia, plus support for 4 monitors does come handy as well (running all 4 of them without problems) I can only highly recommend ati over any nvidia card now. gtx cards seems crippled completely gfor SI, and quadros are waaay more expensive and still I got better results then some quadro cards when we run some tests here on list couple months ago. good luck :)
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
and ati7870... lux gpu only Room: 767 Sala: 1333 Luxball HDR: 10917 Luxball: 1505 Luxball Sky: 4829 From: Mirko Jankovic Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 10:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Graphic card for a workstation again Also if you are interested here are some OpenCL results between gtx680 and ati 7970: Originally Posted by Raycat I ran the Luxmark 2.0 Open CL benchmark. These are the results on my AsUs GTX 680 2 GB (NOT OC'ed): Room: 275 Sala: 605 Luxball HDR: 3925 Luxball: 689 Luxball Sky: 2358 Luxmark 2.0 Open CL benchmark on Radeon HD7970: Room: 585 Sala: 1016 Luxball HDR: 9076 Luxball: 1143 Luxball Sky: 4221 copy paste from this forum on cgtalk: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=23t=1048529page=2pp=15
Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
For the record you can click on Desktop and get the standard Windows desktop you know and love. It does show the Metro UI by default at first though. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Mirko Jankovic mirko.janko...@aeonproduction.com wrote: it seems to be shame that they create OS that works a bit faster/better than win7 and then focus mainly on touch stuff and leave most pro workstation work on dry. was is that hard to leave option to work as normal desktop workstation and not touchcrap? after all all versions ha old win classic look, why not keep it for people that are looking for function an not fancy look.
RE: OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
Microsoft stated Windows 7 mode would be retained, but you would have to activate it from the control panel. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sam Bowling Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 7:33 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone? I tried out the release preview on my laptop and windows 8 is crap. The only reason this exists is so Microsoft can leverage their desktop OS to get people you use their extremely unpopular Phone OS. They have literally removed everything that made windows 7 so popular (start menu, quick searches, etc.). Now you are forced to move your mouse all over the screen to the “hot corners” or “hot edges” to get to all the features you used to easily get to with the start menu. You load to the Phone OS screen and the desktop is now an “app” that you run your “legacy apps” in (IOW, where the real programs run). All the new phone apps load full screen and can not be windowed. That means that all the little helper programs to run in small windows will now load FULL SCREEN. They have basically put a GUI on DOS and added in task swapping. None of the new apps can run in the background as far as I have been able to tell, so they all basically go into hibernation (to save battery life... as if my PC runs on batteries.) when you switch apps, so multitasking is dead unless you are running “Legacy apps” on the Legacy desktop (which they say they will be removing). They want you to buy all these touch enabled tablet things for your PC, so your PC can be as useful as your laptop when you don’t have a mouse. Unlike all the other Windows releases, you can not go back to the older interface style. It has all been physically remove from the OS leaving you with only one choice (even though it was all there in the initial developers preview). Windows 8 is pure rubbish with a clunky, sickening, eye wrenching phone interface plugged on top of it and it has made me do something none of the other OS makers have ever been able to do. I have now seriously considered moving to another OS/Platform. This thing is even more dumbed down than OSX and that is something that I didn’t think was possible. I really tried to get used to windows 8, but I just feel handicapped on that OS. If they don’t do some serious backpedaling in the future I will be moving to something else. I predict that Linux and mac “sales” will increase dramatically over the next few years. From: Paul Griswoldmailto:pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 9:18 AM To: Softimage Mailing listmailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: OT: Windows 8 - anyone? My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul
[no subject]
A gtx 580 with 3 g ram for available graphics and 512 cuda cores fermi seems the best bang for the buck currently. My 2c Manu Envoyé de mon iPhone
Re: Windows 8 - anyone?
Interesting because no one seems to have been able to find it yet. I haven’t tried the actual RTM version. From: Matt Lind Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 7:39 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: OT: Windows 8 - anyone? Microsoft stated Windows 7 mode would be retained, but you would have to activate it from the control panel. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sam Bowling Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 7:33 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone? I tried out the release preview on my laptop and windows 8 is crap. The only reason this exists is so Microsoft can leverage their desktop OS to get people you use their extremely unpopular Phone OS. They have literally removed everything that made windows 7 so popular (start menu, quick searches, etc.). Now you are forced to move your mouse all over the screen to the “hot corners” or “hot edges” to get to all the features you used to easily get to with the start menu. You load to the Phone OS screen and the desktop is now an “app” that you run your “legacy apps” in (IOW, where the real programs run). All the new phone apps load full screen and can not be windowed. That means that all the little helper programs to run in small windows will now load FULL SCREEN. They have basically put a GUI on DOS and added in task swapping. None of the new apps can run in the background as far as I have been able to tell, so they all basically go into hibernation (to save battery life... as if my PC runs on batteries.) when you switch apps, so multitasking is dead unless you are running “Legacy apps” on the Legacy desktop (which they say they will be removing). They want you to buy all these touch enabled tablet things for your PC, so your PC can be as useful as your laptop when you don’t have a mouse. Unlike all the other Windows releases, you can not go back to the older interface style. It has all been physically remove from the OS leaving you with only one choice (even though it was all there in the initial developers preview). Windows 8 is pure rubbish with a clunky, sickening, eye wrenching phone interface plugged on top of it and it has made me do something none of the other OS makers have ever been able to do. I have now seriously considered moving to another OS/Platform. This thing is even more dumbed down than OSX and that is something that I didn’t think was possible. I really tried to get used to windows 8, but I just feel handicapped on that OS. If they don’t do some serious backpedaling in the future I will be moving to something else. I predict that Linux and mac “sales” will increase dramatically over the next few years. From: Paul Griswold Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 9:18 AM To: Softimage Mailing list Subject: OT: Windows 8 - anyone? My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul
RE: Small Annoying Things
Here's my short list, some dating back to v1.x: 1) Inspecting a mixer source or mixer clip via the RMB context menu displays a collapsed PPG that must be manually resized via dragging the mouse to see it's contents. 2) Transfer / Merge Attributes editor found in the Poly.Mesh merge tool, GATOR, and a host of other tools only shows top two rows in the upper pane of the dialog and is NOT resizeable. 3) Transfer / Merge Attributes editor defaults to pairing up cluster properties (UVs, vertex color, user normals) by chronological order of creation instead of by name. 4) Updating a mixer source does not update mixer clips pointing to it from the mixer timeline. 5) No easily accessible UI for looking at image sources/clips on a mixer timeline. Must navigate to the image clip folder in the scene explorer and know to select the image clip(s) to see anything at all. Images should be an available option from the mixer. 6) No SDK access to Spreadsheet view. 7) No option for scaling objects on axes other than local (such as global, object, or COG) 8) Cannot adjust explorer view filter to only show custom properties or other property type data without showing the rest of the object's structure. 9) Deleting selected object from the scene when in an explorer set to selection scope causes scene explorer to go blank even when it's locked (auto refresh deactivated). Really? Can't it just maintain the current view? 10) Texture Editor relax tool doesn't relax. 11) No place to hide custom userdata that isn't in plain view of the user. Would be very useful for custom tools. 12) No paint UI or ability in SDK to create a useful 3D paint system. 13) Performance very bad with many objects in scene regardless of object complexity. 14) No ability to auto update self installing custom properties in a scene after code changes. 15) No falloff icon/manipulator for point lights 16) No ability to send events/callbacks to netview for custom tools to respond (example: on selection change, would like a netview based tool to respond) 17) No ability to preserve work on NURBS Surface when converting to polygon meshother than trivial geometry. 18) Realtime shader system overhauls that shows vertical improvement instead of lateral. 19) Lack of UI customization throughout. Makes custom tool development more difficult than it should be. 20) Ability to substitute operators/operator inputs in the construction history outside of text and curves. 21) Ability to read/write the construction history from the SDK other than a trivial XML dump. What's needed is low level access to operator inputs/outputs so the operators can be recreated exactly using custom importers/exporters. Example: the 'movecomponent' operator does not expose any parameters. Therefore a custom tool which needs to build an object from a file description cannot recreate the movecomponent operator on the generated object's stack. 22) ASCII file format for all presets, scene files, models, and other externally referenced data specific to the application. 23) A finished NURBS modeling toolset. 24) Ability to read / write NURBS data in parameterizations other than Non-Uniform. 25) Ability to get access to a reference model's Delta via the scripting object model. 26) Ability to write to a PointCloud from scripting. Example: apply color values to the points in the point cloud. 27) Ability to duplicate an object contained in a referenced model. That is, the resulting duplicate should be local to the scene and have no affiliation with the referenced model from which it was derived. 28) Ability to define presets / default values for commonly used tools. 29) An Image clip viewer available directly from the viewport menus which allows panning, zooming, resizing, channel component viewing, etc... that was written in the last 15 years. 30) Tools for selecting subcomponents from samples (eg: uv -- polygons). Needed outside the texture editor. 31) Customizable context menus for tools allowing removal and rearranging of tools, and allows arbitrary ordering/placement of custom tools. 32) Tear away controls from any toolbar that doesn't require an entire package of buttons/controls to be torn away with it. Example: I just want to tear the snapshot button off the FCurve editor toolbar. I don't want the swap buffer, HLE, and other tools to come with it. 33) A toolbar/layout/shelf editor that was built in the last 15 years and works on drag n' drop and tear away editing principles. Heck, even the old SI3D dialog editor was more intuitive than the XSI version. 34) Ability to put expressions, constraints, and other data types into mixer sources via the SDK, AND the ability to do so without requiring the parameters contained in a mixer source to exist in the current scene. 35) Why do primitive NURBS circles and squares default to having so many control points? 36) Using any tool which creates a sample
Re: OT: Windows 8 - anyone?
this makes me think about Apple rumour to let go the dev on the mac pros... Seem's everybody is going nuts on the mobile thing. And all professional market get's ignored!! i wont be able to do Arnold render regions on my f-ing iphone! wtf is going on with these guys!? sly -- Sylvain Lebeau // SHED V-P/Visual effects supervisor 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E TAGE MONTRAL (QUBEC) H3A 1P8 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM Paul Griswold Friday, August 17, 2012 12:18 PM My main Win 7 workstation has been really acting flaky lately. Microsoft has just release Windows 8 RTM, so I was wondering if anyone had tested it out yet? I realize there are plenty of opinions on the whole Metro interface, but I'm just wondering if it's stable and if Softimage will run under it. I need to take a weekend and reformat this machine start over anyway. Thanks, Paul
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
I would personally choose Nvidia over ATI... ;) Chris On 18 Aug, 2012, at 3:24 AM, Len Krenzler l...@creativecontrol.camailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca wrote: A lot of people that were testing on XSIbase were getting drastically better performance from the ATI cards (about 2x-3x) and the point selection problem seemed to be gone. The latest Nvidia GTX cards (after the 2xx series) seem to be intentionally hobbled. The conclusion on the XSIbase forum seemed heavily in favor of the ATI. On 8/17/2012 12:36 PM, Leoung O'Young wrote: Trying to decide on a graphic card for a workstation. I was doing some research, there is suppose to be a good discussion in the XSIbase forum but the site comes up with a virus warning. Any thought on the list of cards?. Normally I would stay with the Nvidia but I have read good things about the AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 We are using Nvdia GTX 260 right now and it works fine but would like to upgrade for the next workstation. $400 to $600 CAN Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 AMD/ATI Radeon HD7970 $200 to $250 CAN NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1.0GB DDR3 PCI-E16 DVI Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card Nvidia GTX 550TI, 560, 570, 580 Thanks, Leoung -- _ Len Krenzler - Creative Control Media Productions Phone: 780.463.3126 www.creativecontrol.cahttp://www.creativecontrol.ca - l...@creativecontrol.camailto:l...@creativecontrol.ca attachment: winmail.dat
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Any reason for that kind of personal preference, when all tests shows that nvidia is staying in the dust behind ati? btw talking about gaming cards here, not overpriced quadros :) If someone else was buying and not interested in budget then fine but when waging performance / price wise as mentioned before in some tests back right on this list hd7970 got better results than quadro 5000 which is couple times more expensive :) nvidia gtx cards can;t even compete heheeh
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Chris Chia and I think a few others in the Singapore Softimage team are ex-NVIDIA guys. ;-) -ben On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Mirko Jankovic mirko.janko...@aeonproduction.com wrote: Any reason for that kind of personal preference, when all tests shows that nvidia is staying in the dust behind ati? btw talking about gaming cards here, not overpriced quadros :) If someone else was buying and not interested in budget then fine but when waging performance / price wise as mentioned before in some tests back right on this list hd7970 got better results than quadro 5000 which is couple times more expensive :) nvidia gtx cards can;t even compete heheeh -- Best regards, Ben Houston Voice: 613-762-4113 Skype: ben.exocortex Twitter: @exocortexcom http://Exocortex.com - Passionate CG Software Professionals.
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Nah Ben, that's not the reason! ;) I think Nvidia research has spent a lot of effort in understanding what the production studios really need... Take a look at this interesting article: http://www.nvidia.com/object/wetadigital_avatar.html Chris On 18 Aug, 2012, at 12:11 PM, Ben Houston b...@exocortex.com wrote: Chris Chia and I think a few others in the Singapore Softimage team are ex-NVIDIA guys. ;-) -ben On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Mirko Jankovic mirko.janko...@aeonproduction.com wrote: Any reason for that kind of personal preference, when all tests shows that nvidia is staying in the dust behind ati? btw talking about gaming cards here, not overpriced quadros :) If someone else was buying and not interested in budget then fine but when waging performance / price wise as mentioned before in some tests back right on this list hd7970 got better results than quadro 5000 which is couple times more expensive :) nvidia gtx cards can;t even compete heheeh -- Best regards, Ben Houston Voice: 613-762-4113 Skype: ben.exocortex Twitter: @exocortexcom http://Exocortex.com - Passionate CG Software Professionals. attachment: winmail.dat
Re: Graphic card for a workstation again
Maybe it is so but it still doesn't change the fact that after replacing gtx580 with radeon7970 I got HUGE improvement in frame rates in viewport and no problems at all as well :) It seems that all new gtx cards after 280 are crippled in an effort to push overpriced quadros. But ofc we need to make differences between big studios on one side (usually huge budgets :)) and small to mid studios and freelancers.
