Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: Jordskott tv series visual effects, Softimage+Redshift
Thanks guys! Indeed, Soft is such a powerhouse, I only had to go outside it for volumetric smoke effects, but even emFluid is pretty cool, even though I prefer Houdini. On the 3D side of things it was me and Per Bergstén, an ex-Stopp'er which I like to work with and I also got some help from Robin Erneström who's fulltime at Stopp. Niklas Lundgren (freelancer in Göteborg) did most of the raven animations and also the rig for it in Soft. We also had Victor Sanchez on compositing, he's now an employee as well. Great team and great tools =) On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:20 PM, Morten Bartholdy x...@colorshopvfx.dk wrote: Really well done Arvid! And I too love the Softimage+Redshift combo - I just wish they would support ICE/emFluid volumetrics soon. It is still amazing how much work a small team can do with Softimage. Who were the other guys - staff at Stopp or freelancers? I am asking as it is hard to find (good) XSI freelancers here in Copenhagen. Morten Den 22. maj 2015 kl. 22:37 skrev Arvid Björn arvidbj...@gmail.com: Hi guys, just wanted to show a couple of shots we did for the Swedish tv series Jordskott. We did all the 342 vfx shots for all 10 episodes, all cg in Softimage, rendered in Redshift, Houdini for smoke sim and Nuke for comp. Here's some of the more interesting ones I think (excuse the compression): Full cg env and destruction. Redshift+ICE instance scattering achieved the level of detail, comped using deep data to combine Redshift and Mantra smoke renders. RS frame time was about 20 minutes on this, which is the highest I've ever reached with Redshift I think. https://app.frame.io/f/9839ef2c-0a25-4c41-8308-548078b613b1 Here's a bunch of cg ravens rigged and animated in Softimage, rendered in Redshift. https://app.frame.io/f/17a5c43d-0b29-4928-a0ae-35779930a492 This is a face wound-type thing in a dream sequence, Soft+Redshift https://app.frame.io/f/e7740833-7faa-4e13-a92e-b0be2f75f3b0 All the underwater environments in this sequence is full cg combined with some green screen uw-plates of the actress. The entity is made with a bit of ICE strand magic. Soft+Redshift, RS really has awesome volumetrics btw. https://app.frame.io/f/680ec84a-573d-4e9f-b0e3-9d68a0c3ad3a (with sound, without grade) And about 300 other shots.. =) We worked for ~8 months with a core team of 3 artists including myself, and a few more for shorter periods. I also supervised the vfx on the show, which was a true pleasure! Can't imagine a better tool for the job than Soft and RS, it's quite remarkable how well they work together, it's all rendered on cheap GTX780's as well. So Softimage is alive and well over here at least! The Maya licenses doesn't even work as a door stop, not sure why we keep them around really. We'll do a proper reel for the whole season soonish, hope you like it! Cheers
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
No, thanks for the suggestion. On 28/05/2015 7:46 PM, Sven Constable wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
RE: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
If your heavy scene is truly heavy, past the 3.5GB mark, you might be bumping into a known design limitation of the 970 that basically craps itself if memory usage exceeds the 3.5 mark (even if you have 4 on board). On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.com wrote: No, thanks for the suggestion. On 28/05/2015 7:46 PM, Sven Constable wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
inside Softimage 2915 Apparently softimage rises from the ashes, but in a far distant future ;) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 6:20 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.com wrote: We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Sorry, typo, need new glasses. On 28/05/2015 7:31 PM, Greg Punchatz wrote: inside Softimage 2915 Apparently softimage rises from the ashes, but in a far distant future ;) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 6:20 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.com mailto:digim...@digimata.com wrote: We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Hi Sven, Where do you add xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? Thanks, Leoung On 28/05/2015 7:46 PM, Sven Constable wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Another thing worth a shot is going to microsoft.com and finding the latest directX installer, trying to install it won´t hurt if something newer is already installed but directx was something i found was missing in machines giving sluggish performance in the past. it sounds far fetched but it makes sense, kind of. cheers, tim Am 29.05.2015 um 07:19 schrieb Sven Constable: The standard (global) settings are different from the softimage settings provided by nvidia. I had selection problems on nvidia based workstations and after I changed to the softimage settings, problems are gone. Even it not applies to that heavy geo problem, it doesn't hurt. *From:*softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Raffaele Fragapane *Sent:* Friday, May 29, 2015 6:33 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 Unless you need to have separate configurations for different apps why would you do that? On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de mailto:sixsi_l...@imagefront.de wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Unless you need to have separate configurations for different apps why would you do that? On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
RE: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970
Open up Nvidia control panel. Under 3D Settings-Manage 3d settings-Program settings. CLick add.Choose the xsi.exe (C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2015 SP1\Application\bin\) -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 6:24 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 Hi Sven, Where do you add xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? Thanks, Leoung On 28/05/2015 7:46 PM, Sven Constable wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: Softimage Digest, Vol 78, Issue 106
for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://listproc.autodesk.com/pipermail/softimage/attachments/20150528/ba23d260/attachment.html -- ___ Softimage mailing list Softimage@listproc.autodesk.com http://listproc.autodesk.com/mailman/listinfo/softimage End of Softimage Digest, Vol 78, Issue 106 **
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Houdini attribute transfer does some bloody fantastic things if you use it right. The more I work in houdini, the more I can come to terms with the death of softimage. G On 28/05/2015 12:40, Nicolas Esposito wrote: Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com mailto:zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com mailto:bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com mailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com mailto:car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com mailto:luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com mailto:speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Well it is more matter of if you don;t know what is it and how useful it is then you wont miss it. That is case with a lot of things in Maya that people accepted as truth nuder the sun, and not knowing that it can be better they don't miss it. In one occasion in studio of couple maya guys no one managed to transfer UV map from identical topology model from one to another. After digging in google I managed to find a way, which is some nasty go into hyper-schematic or something dig into hidden notes, cut copy move... manged but man what is 1min job with GATOR turned out to be over hour nightmare in Maya. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
On 28.05.2015, at 13:50, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: Houdini attribute transfer does some bloody fantastic things if you use it right. The more I work in houdini, the more I can come to terms with the death of softimage. Finally, a mention of Houdini’s Attribute Transfer.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
You need to work on some new material :) On 28 May 2015 at 09:17, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
A simple GATOR replacement would probably refresh the material ... On 28 May 2015 at 15:36, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: You need to work on some new material :) On 28 May 2015 at 09:17, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Softimage going to sleep on Windows 8
Hey list, since updating to Windows 8 I've had the issue that if I leave softimage alone for a few minutes, it takes about 10 seconds for it to become responsive again after tabbing/clicking back into it. I have a fast SSD, plenty of RAM and not much else going on. Has anyone else encountered this issue? Cheers. -Leo
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I was replying about who was the design partner, not who used it after the it was released. On 28 May 2015 at 12:03, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: Ehm... MGS4 meets Assassin's Creed As far sa I remember: Konami Sega Square Enix Crytek Namco Capcom Others probably... 2015-05-28 17:57 GMT+02:00 Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com: Or it might have been Sega or Capcomp.. it was definitely one of these three big japan Softimage client. This was all about transferring uv and weighting between game characters and same and different resolutions. On 27 May 2015 at 21:13, Martin Contel martin3d...@gmail.com wrote: Really, for Square?! :) There are still lots of XSI seats here, all of them on the game development teams. At Visual Works (the CG cinematics division) everything is Maya and a tinny bit of Houdini. Cheers, -- Martin Contel CG Supervisor Square Enix (Visual Works Division) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI
RE: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
+1 well stated On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. Correct! It's not the fact that GATOR exists; it's the usability and artist-friendliness of the workflow that make the difference. -- -=T=-
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Ehm... MGS4 meets Assassin's Creed https://youtu.be/U-DrkSQLHsk?t=1m45s As far sa I remember: Konami Sega Square Enix Crytek Namco Capcom Others probably... 2015-05-28 17:57 GMT+02:00 Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com: Or it might have been Sega or Capcomp.. it was definitely one of these three big japan Softimage client. This was all about transferring uv and weighting between game characters and same and different resolutions. On 27 May 2015 at 21:13, Martin Contel martin3d...@gmail.com wrote: Really, for Square?! :) There are still lots of XSI seats here, all of them on the game development teams. At Visual Works (the CG cinematics division) everything is Maya and a tinny bit of Houdini. Cheers, -- Martin Contel CG Supervisor Square Enix (Visual Works Division) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI
Re: Softimage going to sleep on Windows 8
Did you turn off the Reload Externally Modified Clips On Focus in the Prefs Rendering Images Tab? On Thursday, May 28, 2015 10:43:22 AM, Leonard Koch wrote: Hey list, since updating to Windows 8 I've had the issue that if I leave softimage alone for a few minutes, it takes about 10 seconds for it to become responsive again after tabbing/clicking back into it. I have a fast SSD, plenty of RAM and not much else going on. Has anyone else encountered this issue? Cheers. -Leo
Re: Softimage going to sleep on Windows 8
We're not using Windows 8 but if there are files in External Files that can't be found I think XSI tries to refresh when alt-tabbing. I'm not sure what the fix would be, barring fixing the path(s) - I think referenced objects with Animation Mixer nodes may be particularly susceptible to the problem (they seem to return a lot of \\none paths). On 28 May 2015 at 16:43, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com wrote: Hey list, since updating to Windows 8 I've had the issue that if I leave softimage alone for a few minutes, it takes about 10 seconds for it to become responsive again after tabbing/clicking back into it. I have a fast SSD, plenty of RAM and not much else going on. Has anyone else encountered this issue? Cheers. -Leo
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. Correct! It's not the fact that GATOR exists; it's the usability and artist-friendliness of the workflow that make the difference.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I think it doesn't matter that there is a patent around some implementation detail of attribute transfer in XSI, or even who wrote it. I think what people see in a GATOR is a menu item in XSI that will transfer property maps, uv, skinning between objects reliably and without having to understand the details. Why that works is because of decisions in XSI'd design and architecture, because you have to have something that's property-based in the first place and all that cluster updating thing beneath to use it as a live operator. Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. On 28 May 2015 at 08:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201 Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
