Re: OTish - Soft2Maya transition list

[Raffaele Fragapane]

There actually is a cult you can turn to for this kind of stuff
http://www.cultofrig.com

And now I will fade into the silent background for another year or two,
after having incidentally proven right both the comment about turning to
faith, and the one about old timers lurking.

Cheers,
Raff

On 31 May 2017 11:28 PM, "Olivier Jeannel"  wrote:

> You may want to join a suicidal-group hotline, or maybe turn yourself to a
> religion ?
>
> Sorry, couldn't resist :
>
> Good luck ;)
>
> 2017-05-31 15:19 GMT+02:00 Enter Reality <3dv...@gmail.com>:
>
>> After 3 years here is my situation:
>>
>> - Modeling: Trying with Maya, fuck it, use Softimage
>> - Animation: some good tools, but overall the flexibility of Sofimage
>> still is a strong advantage point
>> - Rigging: Surprisingly I feel more comfortable with constraints in Maya
>> then Soft, and overall ( using the ART toolkit in order to build characters
>> for the Unreal Engine 4 ) the entire process is quite good...when it comes
>> to skinning, the rule "Fuck it, export to Soft then import the finished
>> product in Maya" still wins
>> - Texturing/shading: Jesus...it's a mess
>> - Rendering: almost gave up
>>
>> Overall I still rely on Soft A LOT almost every day
>>
>> I feel your pain Morten, but I honestly don't even want to join another
>> mailing list where all the answers are "You need to code that"
>>
>> On youtube you an still find the videos made by Autodesk about the
>> transition Soft to Maya
>>
>> 2017-05-31 14:45 GMT+02:00 Morten Bartholdy :
>>
>>> I seem to have seen someone mentioning it here in the past, but can't
>>> remember. Is there a Maya userlist somewhere, hopefully as helpful as this
>>> one, or perhaps a forum for suffering Soft2Maya transitioners like myself?
>>>
>>> And what a godawful piece of shit software that is!
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> Morten
>>> --
>>> Softimage Mailing List.
>>> To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com
>>> with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Softimage Mailing List.
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>> with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
>>
>
>
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Re: SI 2014

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Honest question here, but can't you just drop MRay and move to a decent
engine?

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 5:13 AM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] 
j.ponthi...@nasa.gov wrote:

  I’m running Soft 2014. I am experiencing a lot of render crashes where
 Mental Ray is being purposely disabled by the software.





 I can update to:



 2014 SP1

 2014 SP2

 2015

 2016



 Whats the best choice? What is everyone having the least issues with?





 Thanks



 --

 Joey Ponthieux

 LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES)

 MYMIC Technical Services

 NASA Langley Research Center

 __

 Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not

 represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.






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Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
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Re: OT: Mouse recommendations

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Hey Eric,

All I wrote is obviously personal, I know not everybody feels that way
about the Evo, some people never adjust to it, some people can't live with
anything else. Well, except possibly the fact evo's research is sketchy
(50-70 degree is better than their 85).
The thumb thing does happen to me after prolonged use, especially if I have
to frequently hold the clicks, in which case a flat mouse will not present
the problem as you don't have to exert any force opposite to the click, the
desk will do it for you.

I've used an evo one (OK), an evo 2 (horrible PoS), skipped the three, and
I use an evo 4 now, or whatever was the latest and greatest last year (the
one with the sensitivity/speed leds) which is OK-ish at best in my book. At
least the build quality isn't as embarrassing as the evo2, though still
overly light and flimsy, but the MMB is excellent (left is weak and too
light for me).

I strongly encourage anyone who wants to take care of their wrists to
alternate mice that have different angles and a pen if you can, either by
rotation, or if you have something you will do frequently whichever fits
best for that task for its duration.
RSI requires repetition, cycling the stress through different parts of your
arm throughout the day is the best action you can take, unless you have one
very particular weakness and need to prioritize excluding that.

My ideal angle remains around 50. Hold a pen or a pencil in a relaxed
fashion, or just do light scribbling on a Wacom, and see where you land,
chances are whatever has that angle will be your favourite mouse :)

YMMV


On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hey Raffaele,

 At that price, I'll have to pick up a couple of those for my children. I
 just wish that is had three full buttons.

 I have to disagree about the thumb gripping on the Evlouent 4 though, I do
 not have any cramping issues with the version 4 of the mouse; the buttons
 are very easy to press. Perhaps you used an earlier model? Also I really
 like having a dedicated middle button (I never could get used to clicking
 with the mouse wheel)

 Cheers,
 -=Eric

 On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:


 http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic-Optical-1600DPI/dp/B00BIFNTMC
 A fraction of the price of the Evoluent and, other than the lack of
 middle mouse button, a far superior mouse.
 I have both, and I regret having spent the cash for an Evoluent.

 The Evo is also at too vertical an angle which for a lot of people, me
 included, means you have to oppose the clicks with your thumb strongly
 enough that you will get tension and cramps around it. The Anker doesn't
 have the issue.

 It's worth at the very least to try both and return the one you don't
 like.

 All in all the Evo is overrated. They were first, but their medical
 claims are sketchy at best, fully vertical is far from ideal for your
 wrist. The ideal is to alternate between pen and two angles of mouse
 throughout the day. It's what I do at home, and pen + evo at work.

 On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:52 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 After my wrists got jacked up around 8 years ago, I switched to a wired
 version of this mouse:

 http://www.thehumansolution.com/evoluent-wireless-vertical-mouse-vm4w.html
 --




 -=T=-




 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!




 --




 -=T=-




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: OT: Mouse recommendations

[Raffaele Fragapane]

http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic-Optical-1600DPI/dp/B00BIFNTMC
A fraction of the price of the Evoluent and, other than the lack of middle
mouse button, a far superior mouse.
I have both, and I regret having spent the cash for an Evoluent.

The Evo is also at too vertical an angle which for a lot of people, me
included, means you have to oppose the clicks with your thumb strongly
enough that you will get tension and cramps around it. The Anker doesn't
have the issue.

It's worth at the very least to try both and return the one you don't like.

All in all the Evo is overrated. They were first, but their medical claims
are sketchy at best, fully vertical is far from ideal for your wrist. The
ideal is to alternate between pen and two angles of mouse throughout the
day. It's what I do at home, and pen + evo at work.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:52 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com wrote:

 After my wrists got jacked up around 8 years ago, I switched to a wired
 version of this mouse:
 http://www.thehumansolution.com/evoluent-wireless-vertical-mouse-vm4w.html
 --




 -=T=-




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE team went to Maya (2011)

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I wasn't implying Jason did :) I was just saying I don't know of SESI  ever
mentioning ICE developers coming on board.

As for the rest, I don't think it was meant to be misleading, but sure,
people will make some tenuous logical connections at times and might have
misled themselves making them.

By the same standards loosened only the tiniest bit then AD's claims about
ICE dev are also somewhat weak, since the people who did the actual heavy
lifting, design and architectural work are, AFAIK, not the ones that ended
up staying 'til today (speaking of ICE, not Naiad). This is where it starts
getting uncomfortable as it nears name dropping, and I'm not comfortable
with that.

There might have been 20 people tagged in relation to ICE, but at the heart
of it there are what, 4 or 5 names that really made a difference? And of
those one has left CG and one has left Software vendors (or had last time I
checked, which was a while ago).

Of the lot probably only Fabric can lay a heritage claim of sorts I
believe, not that it really matters though.
All in all this is taking an odd turn, and I think part of it stems from a
general misunderstanding of development by people who don't do it for a
living.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 3:57 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On 9 June 2015 at 23:07, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:
  They never said anything involving ICE AFAIK.

 Neither did Jason.

  They did mention that they are trying to make Houdini more pleasant to
 use,
  and want animation (the user facing, artist oriented part of it) to
 receive
  more attention, and that they have a Softimage developer on board
  contributing to that. Both those statements are true. They are doing good
  work in those regards, and part of that work is done by an ex Softie.

 Maybe factually true, but meant to mislead IMHO, because they don't
 have a background UI/animation/modelling workflows, they come from
 XSI's mental ray integration and viewport HD.
 That makes these developers equal to just about any experienced
 developers starting into something new.  IMHO it's quite different
 when ADSK or Fabric says, ho, we're working on something procedural
 and we have these guys who worked on something similar before in XSI.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE team went to Maya (2011)

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You might be taking this a bit more personally and at heart than I thought
you would to be honest.
I don't consider myself the arbiter of anything, but I guess I'll get out
of this since it seems people get touchy easily.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
wrote:

  Of the lot probably only Fabric can lay a heritage claim of sorts I
 believe,
  not that it really matters though.
  All in all this is taking an odd turn, and I think part of it stems from
 a
  general misunderstanding of development by people who don't do it for a
  living.

 I like how you are the arbiter of who's a real ICE developer, from
 your perspective as a user in Australia and not involved with the
 development in Montreal. Anyway, the point was only about that
 animation workflow bit being a bit of a stretch imho.

 The Fabric or Bifrost/ICE heritage..  well that's a bit more nuanced
 discussion than claims laid over developers, because AFAIK neither
 group is trying to simply re-create ICE.

 Bifrost is a group of developers from various background, some knowing
 nothing of either ICE or Maya, but getting Oscars for their fluid work
 (http://tinyurl.com/o9vatz5), old people, new people, plus a group
 people from Softimage including ICE core developers,
 caching/SDK/modelling/etc, QA,doc,etc.

 But they're not really trying to re-create ICE or make a descendant of
 it, what they're saying is that the design of the graph workflows
 (still to come) will be informed by it.  There is not a single day at
 work where someone doesn't say we did this that way in ICE because
 ...  But there are also a lot of ideas coming from other places,
 background, and production experiences.


 On 10 June 2015 at 19:26, Raffaele Fragapane
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
  I wasn't implying Jason did :) I was just saying I don't know of SESI
 ever
  mentioning ICE developers coming on board.
 
  As for the rest, I don't think it was meant to be misleading, but sure,
  people will make some tenuous logical connections at times and might have
  misled themselves making them.
 
  By the same standards loosened only the tiniest bit then AD's claims
 about
  ICE dev are also somewhat weak, since the people who did the actual heavy
  lifting, design and architectural work are, AFAIK, not the ones that
 ended
  up staying 'til today (speaking of ICE, not Naiad). This is where it
 starts
  getting uncomfortable as it nears name dropping, and I'm not comfortable
  with that.
 
  There might have been 20 people tagged in relation to ICE, but at the
 heart
  of it there are what, 4 or 5 names that really made a difference? And of
  those one has left CG and one has left Software vendors (or had last
 time I
  checked, which was a while ago).
 




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE team went to Maya (2011)

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Should probably add, modelling too, and you can pretty much swap animation
and modelling in my mail above and all of it remains pretty much true :)

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 1:07 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 They never said anything involving ICE AFAIK.

 They did mention that they are trying to make Houdini more pleasant to
 use, and want animation (the user facing, artist oriented part of it) to
 receive more attention, and that they have a Softimage developer on board
 contributing to that. Both those statements are true. They are doing good
 work in those regards, and part of that work is done by an ex Softie.

 To my knowledge that's the extent of it. I've yet to see or hear ICE
 mentioned at all, let alone ex developers of it, by SideFX people.


 On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Andy Goehler lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com
  wrote:


 On Jun 05, 2015, at 22:02, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

 …Houdini says has an ICE team…


 Do they? I don’t recall, have any sources?





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE team went to Maya (2011)

[Raffaele Fragapane]

They never said anything involving ICE AFAIK.

They did mention that they are trying to make Houdini more pleasant to use,
and want animation (the user facing, artist oriented part of it) to receive
more attention, and that they have a Softimage developer on board
contributing to that. Both those statements are true. They are doing good
work in those regards, and part of that work is done by an ex Softie.

To my knowledge that's the extent of it. I've yet to see or hear ICE
mentioned at all, let alone ex developers of it, by SideFX people.

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Andy Goehler lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com
wrote:


 On Jun 05, 2015, at 22:02, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

 …Houdini says has an ICE team…


 Do they? I don’t recall, have any sources?

Re: Compiling Softimage Plugins for Linux from Windows

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I'm with Ben.
Go for a fully virtualized environment if you really don't want to re boot
across OS'.
The whole partial environment and so on is a mess and it never works out.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:02 AM, Leonard Koch leonardkoch...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Hi List,

 I'm wanting to recompile a few plugins for linux, but would like to do so
 from windows.

 I have mingw and mingw32-make installed and working, but I don't have the
 files vars.gnu and rules.gnu in my XSISDK_ROOT/mkfiles folder, which are
 required for the gnumakefile to set up the environment correctly.

 Can I get those somewhere or is there simply a better way of doing this?

 Thanks a lot!

 -Leonard

Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Huh?
The width is whatever is required for the controllers to address the RAM.
If they have 12GB over 6 32bit controllers as that manufacturing specs max
why would they have more than 384?

Also, what the architecture and the proposed manufacturing guidelines allow
in terms of addressing width isn't the same as what's out in the current
card of the month.

The 980 is the same in most regards but only has 256bit in example because
al it needs to address is 8GB.

If they need to address more It's very likely the width can be pushed a
good deal further.

The bottleneck isn't currently measured in bus width, the throughput is an
issue, and it's got little to do with the width of addressing stacks, and
it's why things like NVLink and new PCI bus specs and so on are being
looked into.

There are a lot other design issues that are being worked on by more than
just a company, the addressing width across the bus isn't particularly
symptomatic of any of those AFAIK.


On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 3:58 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

  The 980ti (starting at EUR 735,-) is a good opportunity compared to the
 gtx980 (starting at EUR 500,-)
 but it is annoying to know that Video-RAM will soon become a bottleneck
 because more and more
 applications start to utilize GPU performance to their benefit, either
 when caching out like in Nuke for
 huge environment images or a GPU renderer like Redshift3D having to
 optimize, e.g. limit it´s
 cache sizes to fit into a smaller than desireable meomory footprint.

 All that on top of what a 4k display would demand for it´s share of
 available video memory to start with.

 I think Nvidia missed an opportunity there, not just for quadro cards.
 They are pulling an Intel in terms of price tags but they didn´t make sure
 their base is safe for the future.

 I had hoped for a wider than 384bit bus, e.g. something more like a 512bit
 bandwidth which would
 have made power of two steps in video ram more likely, e.g. cards with
 4GB, 8GB, 12GB, 16GB, etc.

 To me, it seems the gtx9xx bus width comes directly from the gtx7xx range,
 which was already starting
 to show limits in buswidth back then.

 All that said and taking tax laws and such for wrting off hardware into
 account, I´d probably have to go
 with a Titan, using it 2-3 years and finding myself wanting more video ram
 soon anyway...

 Cheers,

 tim

Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You say 350 cheaper without looking at the actual percentages.

The 980ti is announced to be a 650-750 card with tit for tat the same specs
of a Titan, the Titan is 1180-1350.
At the worst, if you go for a premium ti and compare it to the cheapest X
on offer somewhere, you still end up with a 62-65% of the price of a Titan.

You pay almost half the price when the only thing that's half is the
memory. Unit count, number crunching, controllers, everything is the same
as the double-the-price sibling.

How is the 980ti a bad deal?

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 4:41 AM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
wrote:

 Actually I find it a quite bad deal compared to the Titan X.
 only 350 cheaper but only half the memory.
 If I would spend 650 for a card already, there wouldn't be any question
 that I would directly go for the Titan X with double memory.

 2015-06-02 19:33 GMT+02:00 Andres Stephens drais...@outlook.com:

  That card is a great deal.


 *From:* Cristobal Infante cgc...@gmail.com
 *Sent:* ‎Monday‎, ‎June‎ ‎1‎, ‎2015 ‎14‎:‎07‎:‎40‎ ‎
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

 980ti is out for anyone shopping for a 6gig card

 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9306/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-review


 On Sunday, 31 May 2015, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 I remember that to be the case for one batch of 2xx drivers ages ago.
 Thought it would have been long gone, but fair enough, certainly worth
 trying if that's still there.
 On 30 May 2015 04:32, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote:

 intuitively you'd think adding the .exe in the nvidia panel has no
 effect, but I'm not 100% sure about that, because the drivers do have
 hard coded app-specific code certain apps including Softimage and
 there is a possibly that this could enable them.  Would need to be
 verified.

 On 29 May 2015 at 02:47, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
  That's usually the quadro cards, I don't know of the gtx driver branch
  offering the AD apps as one you can pick. Maybe it changed and I
 didn't
  notice though.
 
  Adding the exe though simply changes the (subset of per app) settings
 for
  that app, changing them globally sorts the same effect.




 --
 --
 cont...@marioreitbauer.com
 0049 (0)157 86272215
 Professor-Brix-Weg 9
 22767 Hamburg
 --




-- 
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

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I remember that to be the case for one batch of 2xx drivers ages ago.
Thought it would have been long gone, but fair enough, certainly worth
trying if that's still there.
On 30 May 2015 04:32, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote:

 intuitively you'd think adding the .exe in the nvidia panel has no
 effect, but I'm not 100% sure about that, because the drivers do have
 hard coded app-specific code certain apps including Softimage and
 there is a possibly that this could enable them.  Would need to be
 verified.

 On 29 May 2015 at 02:47, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:
  That's usually the quadro cards, I don't know of the gtx driver branch
  offering the AD apps as one you can pick. Maybe it changed and I didn't
  notice though.
 
  Adding the exe though simply changes the (subset of per app) settings for
  that app, changing them globally sorts the same effect.

Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970

[Raffaele Fragapane]

That's usually the quadro cards, I don't know of the gtx driver branch
offering the AD apps as one you can pick. Maybe it changed and I didn't
notice though.

Adding the exe though simply changes the (subset of per app) settings for
that app, changing them globally sorts the same effect.

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
wrote:

 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
 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!




-- 
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

[Raffaele Fragapane]

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

[Raffaele Fragapane]

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: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008

[Raffaele Fragapane]

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: The next Lego movie and Soft..

[Raffaele Fragapane]

EOI?

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Daniel Kim danielki...@gmail.com wrote:

 It seems like AL is getting EOI for Vancouver office. I hope they also
 hire internationals :)




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: The next Lego movie and Soft..

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I don't think at this point we're allowed to say anything about the
Vancouver office, partly because it hasn't even opened doors yet :p

Soon enough recruiting will open up, and at that point a mix of job
descriptions and interviews will probably make it clear where it's going,
until then we can't tell.

Personally, at least for now, I'm stationed in Sydney and busy otherwise,
but I'm sure at some point I'll have a chance to at least visit the Vanc
premises.

The current two movies in production are still on Soft for anim/rigging,
that's no secret.

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Adam Sale adamfs...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hey Raf..
 I was curious,
 Is there any word on how AL will handle the next Lego movies in Vancouver?
 Keep it in Soft, port everything to Maya?

 Are you going to be stationed up here in the near future?

 Adam




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: The next Lego movie and Soft..

[Raffaele Fragapane]

A dispassionate word of advice to anybody who wishes to work in the
performance departments around here: Shed your software allegiances,
whatever we use is so heavily augmented by our own framework, and the base
builds so rooted in our procedural rigging API, that whether we nominally
use Maya or Soft as a client you barely spend any time in either on a brick
movie. 90% of the time TDs spend rigging anything is either in an IDE or in
our own propietary system.

Re: Is purchasing a new softimage license impossible?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Is it really an issue?

It's not like people have flocked to this list like flies to corpses to
pimp and peddle. The non-Soft posts are come either from people who have
explicitly been invited to the list by long standing members in time of
crisis, or by long enough standing members, and I've seen Chris' name
plenty times before. Personally I'm interested in seeing how others are
coping with change (in ways other than ignoring its necessity, which is a
viable strategy only for so long).

I see your point Matt, and I don't disagree, but while it's only fair that
this list is used predominantly for those continuing to use Soft (we're
still doing movies with it here at AL), the Softimage Experience now is
also about other people who have used Soft sharing their experience in
moving away from it as sad as it might be. Almost everybody, sooner or
later, will have to walk that path, and there's nobody more indicated to
advise than other members of this list.

I don't know, seems a bit of a storm in a glass of water to me.

Re: Is purchasing a new softimage license impossible?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I don't know, Sylvain.
I appreciate the effort, but that's exactly how fragmenting a community
down to small enough bits that each will eventually die starts in my
experience.

If enough people express the desire that this place should be unadulterated
Softimage itself, without discussion on migration and alternatives, sure,
then maybe parallel subset groups would be good, but until then I'd rather
not see the core participants breaking their contributions apart in
different places.

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Sylvain Lebeau s...@shedmtl.com wrote:

 i did a mailing list about peoples who wants to exchange freely on their
 new ventures…

 it’s here:


 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/softimage-old-timmers-helping-each-others-out


 feel free to join in and share….. and I am assured we will have great
 discussions.


 peace


 sly




 *Sylvain Lebeau // SHED*
 V-P/Visual effects supervisor
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/ 
 http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/
 VFX Curriculum 03: Compositing Basics
 mail to: s...@shedmtl.com




 On May 14, 2015, at 9:09 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com wrote:

 Yeah I agree entirely with what Raf said.

 In addition if enough people want the discussions about transition
 experiences of members of our community to stop here I can get on board.
 Just know that when that happens the community will start to dwindle
 rapidly. It's the same damn point that's been made over and over since the
 EOL announcement. We're going to have to move somewhere else. Softimage is
 done. Some of us are transitioning sooner than others. This is going to
 leave the community pretty fragmented so topics and sharing of experiences
 is going to be very mixed up.

 If you hit something you don't want to read move on.

 Eric T.

 
 Eric Thivierge
 http://www.ethivierge.com

 On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 8:43 PM, Sylvain Lebeau s...@shedmtl.com wrote:

 A message of great nostalgia, sadness but also realism and share
 fullness.


 sly







 *Sylvain Lebeau // SHED*
 V-P/Visual effects supervisor
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/ 
 http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/






 On May 14, 2015, at 8:02 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Is it really an issue?

 It's not like people have flocked to this list like flies to corpses to
 pimp and peddle. The non-Soft posts are come either from people who have
 explicitly been invited to the list by long standing members in time of
 crisis, or by long enough standing members, and I've seen Chris' name
 plenty times before. Personally I'm interested in seeing how others are
 coping with change (in ways other than ignoring its necessity, which is a
 viable strategy only for so long).

 I see your point Matt, and I don't disagree, but while it's only fair
 that this list is used predominantly for those continuing to use Soft
 (we're still doing movies with it here at AL), the Softimage Experience
 now is also about other people who have used Soft sharing their experience
 in moving away from it as sad as it might be. Almost everybody, sooner or
 later, will have to walk that path, and there's nobody more indicated to
 advise than other members of this list.

 I don't know, seems a bit of a storm in a glass of water to me.







-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Any equivalent to Custom Param sets in Maya?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

There is nothing like what you need, the closest thing however is to use
dummy shapes to host attributes, and instancing those shapes if you want to
proxy that set of attributes elsewhere.
The channel box will aggregate and interval attributes on all shapes for
the selected transform just fine as long as the attributes are keyable

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 4:53 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
wrote:

 Thanks Joey. Unless it's OOTB I'm not touching it. :)

 I'll survive without it for now.

 Eric T.

Re: Softimage Icon Removed from Mudbox?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Or maybe people that want it and want it to work in what isn't a dead
software yet should write to AD and point out they find it inappropriate
that it was removed for what is solely the sake to keep the version numbers
in line ;)

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 5:50 AM, Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com
wrote:

 well just stay on mudbox 2015 then as well. not like they made anything
 interesting in 2016 anyway

 On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 9:07 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Mudbox to Softimage, It's something i'll miss a lot then, it works really
 good. Maya to Softimage and viceversa, too. Damn... how the heck they
 remove this thing? It's really important feature, it saves a lot of time.
 If they don't want to give us a 2016 version, at least they'll try to put
 those lines of codes to make it work in the 2015SP2(i hope that's coming?)
 version.

 On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 12:34 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

  It would be a very welcome functionality, especially when being dealt
 an old Softimage 2015 along with everything else labeled 2016 as part of
 a new suite package.

 In the past, I found it difficult to run differently labeled versions,
 e.g. Softimage 2012
 with Maya 2014 or Mudbox 2014 simultaneously, due to lmtools telling me
 there´s
 no license available, that could well be a setup error on my end or a
 misunderstanding
 of the suite licensing scheme but if that´s the root of the problem,
 that Softimage2015
 +Mudbox2016 will not easily serve themselves in sharing a
 (suite)license, then it
 would be a good time to adress that, too?

 Cheers,

 tim






 Am 30.04.2015 um 06:20 schrieb Raffaele Fragapane:

 Yeah, I reckon they should add it back in. AD has back pedalled on some
 minor things like this before, so it might still happen, and it would be a
 welcome grace to a userbase that has, frankly speaking, already been
 slighted pretty hard.

  It certainly won't happen though if part of that user base takes the
 pessimist approach and claims it never worked, when it did, or because they
 don't need it assumes other don't either.

 On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com
 wrote:

  It and goZ are huge time savers! Huge!

  It does seem to me this would fall into the  AD should do it I the
 SPs until the Soft support being promised until 2016

  It is just a few lines of code Luc, can you do us old softies a favor
 and send the request  the send up the ranks to send to apps back in? Did
 Maya and Max lose their send to soft connections too?

  I think we are in our right to ask for this small gesture from AD

  Thanks for listening Luc... I know there is nothing you can promise,
 but give it a shot for those of us you used to your clients.

  g

 Sent from my iPhone







-- 
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 Icon Removed from Mudbox?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Because it's not a redundant copy of I/O commands with presets, it also
keeps the data in sync instead of forcing you to unload/reload.
It was actually pretty useful, and I don't know why people insist it didn't
work, it worked fine. When I was still using Mudbox I used it frequently
enough without issue.

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
wrote:

 I never used that send to xyz. It was just too autodesk. I always
 wondered why to clutter a menue with somthing that’s basically not more
 than an export function.



 sven

Re: Softimage Icon Removed from Mudbox?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Yeah, I reckon they should add it back in. AD has back pedalled on some
minor things like this before, so it might still happen, and it would be a
welcome grace to a userbase that has, frankly speaking, already been
slighted pretty hard.

It certainly won't happen though if part of that user base takes the
pessimist approach and claims it never worked, when it did, or because they
don't need it assumes other don't either.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 It and goZ are huge time savers! Huge!

 It does seem to me this would fall into the  AD should do it I the SPs
 until the Soft support being promised until 2016

 It is just a few lines of code Luc, can you do us old softies a favor and
 send the request  the send up the ranks to send to apps back in? Did Maya
 and Max lose their send to soft connections too?

 I think we are in our right to ask for this small gesture from AD

 Thanks for listening Luc... I know there is nothing you can promise, but
 give it a shot for those of us you used to your clients.

 g

 Sent from my iPhone

Re: The shadow over The Foundry

[Raffaele Fragapane]

AD owned and produced a lot of stuff over the years. The various
acquisitions you are thinking of in the ME group are a drop in the ocean
that is their arch, viz, CAM/CAE budgets.
Alias was bought for studio and the inlet in industrial CAM they missed at
the time. Maya in and of itself is probably not scratching 3 or 4% of their
revenue and I doubt Soft even made it to an integer number.

Adobe is already a bigger company than AD for the record, and has MORE of a
monopoly on its market segments than AD does. They beat AD in revenue and
net by a factor of two most years.

Again, I don't know what Adobe you guys are thinking of, but the one I know
of is nothing to hope for. They make EA sports and AD ME look positively
benign in the VFX geography.



On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote:

 If I remember correcty Autodesk, before the big buyout in recent yearsm
 had only Autocad and 3ds to carry on and make good money...when they start
 acquiring Alias and all the others they establish themself as the company
 to go, simply because they were the owners.

 For me Adobe could possibly be the next Autodesk, but I really hope I'm
 wrong.

 2015-04-28 7:24 GMT+02:00 Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 :

 There must be another company named Adobe I'm not aware of...

 Adobe has had nothing but contempt for VFX for years, and people would
 actually get on board with this?

 If there is any truth to these incompetently written piece of news
 whatsoever, and that's pretty much 50/50 at best, be ready to rent. Windows
 and half arsed Mac ports only, of course.

 On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Better Adobe than Autode$k. Is the less bad co. between both.





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: The shadow over The Foundry

[Raffaele Fragapane]

There must be another company named Adobe I'm not aware of...

Adobe has had nothing but contempt for VFX for years, and people would
actually get on board with this?

If there is any truth to these incompetently written piece of news
whatsoever, and that's pretty much 50/50 at best, be ready to rent. Windows
and half arsed Mac ports only, of course.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Better Adobe than Autode$k. Is the less bad co. between both.

Re: Pose based deformations/corrections in Maya

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Shapes in Maya, AFAIK, only have the equivalent of the object mode of Soft,
which means the displacement is relative to the transform of the object. If
you're after the local frameset, which is in tangent space and accomodates
previous mesh transforms, you won't find it.

If it's something else you are having issues with it's not entirely clear
what it might be. When these things happen and you're after help it's
extremely useful to make a video of the problem. Given how easy it is these
days to upload a screen capture to youtube I'd say you should consider that
for the sake of expediency :)

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 8:56 AM, Adam Sale adamfs...@gmail.com wrote:

 Saf, I forwarded your mail to the guy who made the video as I work with
 him here in Vancouver. I will fwd you any correspondence I get back
 My first thought might be node order. Select your mesh, and RMB on it.
 Choose Inputs  All Inputs. In the stack, drag your blend shape node below
 your skin cluster. (MMB) I can't remember if its mmb drag the skin cluster
 above the blend shape, or vice versa. One of them should do it though.

 One heads up... If you use NG skin tools, I noticed a weird bug where an
 NG skin display layer node inserted somehow into the stack prevents
 re-ordering. If you can find this node in your node editor, delete it, and
 you are good to go. I have only had this happen once, but thought I would
 bring it up anyways.

 PS. one of my colleagues Derik Gokstorp is down your way doing his Masters
 at NCAA . I imagine you've run into him a few times.

 Adam

 On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Sofronis Efstathiou 
 sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk wrote:

  Hi,



 Quick question – has anyone seen this way of creating pose based
 deformations/corrections in Maya, we are not having much success -



 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6ab0kKBlHQ



 When I try to implement this (it’s not that hard – like an input and
 output between two nodes!), I get a few problems. For example, it appears
 that this only works correctly if the manipulation of the points is
 sympathetic to Global transforms. If I try for example to rotate the lower
 leg backwards, and move some points around the knee and calf to simulate a
 better pose deformation; when I reset the joints back to zero, the points
 do not keep their relative offsets correctly. Instead it appears the
 offsets are global values - not relative. Therefore the points begin to
 collapse into the mesh. I know there are a few plugins we can use -  but
 thought this may have been a tidier approach.



 Anyway – if anyone got it to work we would love to know.



 Cheers



 Sofronis (Saf) Efstathiou

 Postgraduate Framework Leader and BFX Competition  Festival Director

 Computer Animation Academic Group

 *National Centre for Computer Animation*


 Email: sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk



 Tel: +44 (0) 1202 965805



 Profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/sofronisefstathiou


 Student Work:

 http://www.youtube.com/NCCA3DAnimation

 http://www.youtube.com/NCCADigitalFX

 http://www.youtube.com/NCCAAnimation



 [image: Description: Description:
 C:\Users\sefstathiou\Pictures\nccalogo.jpg]
 http://ncca.bournemouth.ac.uk/  [image: Description: Description:
 C:\Users\sefstathiou\Documents\My
 Dropbox\Work_Files\NCCA\VFXandAnimation_competition\BFX_website\BFX_Website\bfx_logo_facebook.png]
 http://www.bfxfestival.com/





 [image: http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/Images/QueensAwardLogo.jpg]



 *Awarded for world-class computer animation teaching *

 *with wide scientific and creative applications*


  BU is a Disability Two Ticks Employer and has signed up to the Mindful
 Employer charter. Information about the accessibility of University
 buildings can be found on the BU DisabledGo webpages This email is intended
 only for the person to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential
 information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the
 sender and delete this email, which must not be copied, distributed or
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-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

[Raffaele Fragapane]

What parts of what doco? App? Tutorials? SDK/API?

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl
wrote:

 Now that there are  some clear and commendable results coming from
 Project H,
 could someone in-the-know perhaps tell me, if the Maya docs have also
 gotten a gentle nudge in the right direction?
 And yes I know  many people find them more than sufficient, but relatively
 speaking to the xsidocs they could still  use some love IMHO.

 Greetz
 Leendert

 --

 Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
 Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Or possibly endure. Some days it's like that :p
On 15 Apr 2015 01:37, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl wrote:

 Eric Thivierge schreef op 14-4-2015 om 17:08:

 If you want to stay in the industry and stay relevant you have to evolve.

 Let's say you have to adapt, not necessarily evolve...

 Greetz
 Leendert

 --

 Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
 Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com

Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

[Raffaele Fragapane]

The main point of the new UI isn't to make it prettier, it's largely that
it now responds to high density DPI properly. If you ever tried using older
software, including Soft, on a 4k display or on an ultra HD 10-12 tablet
you'll know what that's like.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Sylvain Lebeau s...@shedmtl.com wrote:

 You point is still good Sven.

 Of course Maya’s Gui is far from getting to the point Xsi is… I profoundly
 think that Xsi got the best Gui in all softwares that ever existed.  The
 new aqua icons are not a revolution of course. Still good to the eye to
 paint the old car with a fresh clear coating. :-)

 We’ve had Autodesk at our studio a couple of times and I must admit they
 we’re very opened to listen to us softimage users. And they we’re taking
 good notes. I think they are doing good efforts to keep Xsi users happy in
 the transition while at the same time not frustrate good old Maya users.
 It will take time to blend the two.


 About ICE.  Maya is node based all around and I cannot imagine AD to own
 these (ICE) pattents and not create the same workflow inside of Maya. With
 new operops, and merging all of it’s tools inside of a new unified workflow
 node UI. Of course this will take time to make everything talk togheter.
 But to me, it should be the priority for AD to implement this.

 I barely see any other futur ventures that could bring back Maya as the
 top contender in the 3D world. Houdini is pushing hard. And it’s doing just
 that at it’s roots.  So if they want to compete in the long term, it really
 should be in the oven.  Well I hope so for them.


 Does 2016 finally got the node based UI for Bitfrost? Would be a good
 start. I was on beta but never got the time to play with it.


 We’ll see in a week or two. But so far nothing about this in the videos.

 sly

 *Sylvain Lebeau // SHED*
 V-P/Visual effects supervisor
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/ 
 http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/
 VFX Curriculum 03: Compositing Basics
 mail to: s...@shedmtl.com




 On Apr 13, 2015, at 8:26 PM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
 wrote:

 sry, didn’t want to adress the developers of course. But the company
 behind them. Marketing means something. The more overwhelming positive it
 is, the more it turns me towards other directions. Same with Newtek and
 lightwave years ago.

 *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sven Constable
 *Sent:* Tuesday, April 14, 2015 2:18 AM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* RE: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

 I had a look at the vids and must say the whole GUI looks as sturdy and
 antique like before. Besides this, if a developer says something is the
 biggest thing ever…I'll take it as a  warning sign.

 sven

 *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *adrian wyer
 *Sent:* Monday, April 13, 2015 6:32 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* RE: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

 looks like a biog step in the right direction, kudos to the devs

 now, about ICE...

 a

 --
 *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Luc-Eric
 Rousseau
 *Sent:* 13 April 2015 17:11
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016


 The node editor remembers the last graph when you reopen it.  Tabs allow
 you to remember multiple graphs.
 On Apr 13, 2015 11:02 AM, Ognjen Vukovic ognj...@gmail.com wrote:
 What irkes me is the fact that you need to create tabs to save your
 network graph lay out. This should just be default instead of drawing it
 out every time you decide you to graph it... Its not really that important,
 but its just shabby.

 On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 4:41 PM, Simon Reeves si...@simonreeves.com
 wrote:
 yeah it's much better, the node editor is much improved, responsive when
 making connections much more rendertree/ice like than the clumsy old version

 They could have improved the horrible shaderball area though...





 Simon Reeves
 London, UK
 *si...@simonreeves.com si...@simonreeves.com*
 *www.simonreeves.com http://www.simonreeves.com/*
 *www.analogstudio.co.uk http://www.analogstudio.co.uk/*

 On 13 April 2015 at 10:47, Angus Davidson angus.david...@wits.ac.za
 wrote:
 Makes me somewhat sad that there will be no new features for  Si 2016,
 However must say while I am forced to use Maya I am at least excited about
 the hypershade finally getting some much needed love.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRVXXw5NZC0




 This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential.
 

Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Bear with me here, I still can't say I find Maya enjoyable to use, but in
first place making the whole UI scalable is non trivial and with the
current move to high density display being well in effect more than just
cosmetics.

On top of that they have, at this point, shown the addition of parallel
evaluation in the scene graph, sculpting and high poly handling in viewport
(probably about a third of the sculpting part of mudbox ported over),
revamped the surfacing considerably, the addition of gas solvers and guided
sims in bifrost, and a number of other things (some admittedly useless to
most or patching over until they can be replaced with less dead horses,
e.g. XGen).

How is that just a coat of polish?
Does AD as a company in general suck? Yeah, in the same way most of those
corps seem to these days.

Can I honestly say Maya 2016 is a shit release? No, you're being overly
emotional and have decided to hate it for the sake of hating it IMO. They
could have added another 15 features and my guess is you probably would
have still decided to give it crap on account of the facelift, despite the
fact it was actually a functional one.

I used 2016 beta a fair bit on a Surface Pro 3. I used it because XSI and
Maya 2015 were F'ing useless on 2.5k on that screen. You can pick on it as
much as you want, but there was strong request for it.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
wrote:

 I never heard of a company that blended two 3D animation softwares
 successfully, sorry dude. That will never happen. What I was told the last
 24 month talking to 3ds max users was: Hell, they changed the GUI again in
 this release! WTF!

 They (the ppl I talked to) did not even mention new feature or something.

 Ok, now ADSK says the icons are now good. But they did say this in the
 last release when they changed the fucking icons!

 It's all about cosmetics and polishing. It's of no use to change the
 coating on a dead horse every fucking single release. I would not have
 worked with softimage the last decade if they changed the GUI in every
 release just to distract from missing functionality.



 If you want to make sure you're working with a strong and solid software,
 the best indication is its not changing its look.

 Sorry for the f-words and beeing emotional.



 sven

Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

[Raffaele Fragapane]

On a 4k 30+ maybe, I've seen it on an ultraHD 27 (and ZB on a 5k 27) and
good chunks of the UI were practically useless.
Zbrush was pretty much a throw away (the x y z modifiers over sliders were
almost impossible to hit with a pen on tablet), and  Maya 2014's text was
an utter and complete mess.

On my SP3, which isn't even 3.8 or 4k over 15 kind of DPI, a lot of older
UIs become useless when you factor in the (lack of) precision when handling
a pen on screen interaction.

Regardless, vectorized and properly scaled UIs are a pain in the arse to
put together, but they are a necessity now that form factors aren't just
1080p over 24 for 90% of the user base.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

  Actually I've seen Soft (or any other non-hi DPI app) on a 4k display
 and it's like having a dual screen in one.

 It's when it's 4k on a 15 inch screen where there are issues.




 On 04/13/15 23:01, Raffaele Fragapane wrote:

 The main point of the new UI isn't to make it prettier, it's largely that
 it now responds to high density DPI properly. If you ever tried using older
 software, including Soft, on a 4k display or on an ultra HD 10-12 tablet
 you'll know what that's like.

 On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Sylvain Lebeau s...@shedmtl.com wrote:

  You point is still good Sven.

  Of course Maya’s Gui is far from getting to the point Xsi is… I
 profoundly think that Xsi got the best Gui in all softwares that ever
 existed.  The new aqua icons are not a revolution of course. Still good to
 the eye to paint the old car with a fresh clear coating. :-)

  We’ve had Autodesk at our studio a couple of times and I must admit
 they we’re very opened to listen to us softimage users. And they we’re
 taking good notes. I think they are doing good efforts to keep Xsi users
 happy in the transition while at the same time not frustrate good old Maya
 users.  It will take time to blend the two.


  About ICE.  Maya is node based all around and I cannot imagine AD to
 own these (ICE) pattents and not create the same workflow inside of Maya.
 With new operops, and merging all of it’s tools inside of a new unified
 workflow node UI. Of course this will take time to make everything talk
 togheter. But to me, it should be the priority for AD to implement this.

  I barely see any other futur ventures that could bring back Maya as the
 top contender in the 3D world. Houdini is pushing hard. And it’s doing just
 that at it’s roots.  So if they want to compete in the long term, it really
 should be in the oven.  Well I hope so for them.


  Does 2016 finally got the node based UI for Bitfrost? Would be a good
 start. I was on beta but never got the time to play with it.


  We’ll see in a week or two. But so far nothing about this in the
 videos.

  sly

   *Sylvain Lebeau // SHED*
 V-P/Visual effects supervisor
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/ 
 http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM http://www.shedmtl.com/
  VFX Curriculum 03: Compositing Basics
 mail to: s...@shedmtl.com




  On Apr 13, 2015, at 8:26 PM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
 wrote:

  sry, didn’t want to adress the developers of course. But the company
 behind them. Marketing means something. The more overwhelming positive it
 is, the more it turns me towards other directions. Same with Newtek and
 lightwave years ago.

  *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sven Constable
 *Sent:* Tuesday, April 14, 2015 2:18 AM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* RE: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

 I had a look at the vids and must say the whole GUI looks as sturdy and
 antique like before. Besides this, if a developer says something is the
 biggest thing ever…I'll take it as a  warning sign.

 sven

  *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *adrian wyer
 *Sent:* Monday, April 13, 2015 6:32 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* RE: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016

 looks like a biog step in the right direction, kudos to the devs

 now, about ICE...

 a

  --
 *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Luc-Eric
 Rousseau
 *Sent:* 13 April 2015 17:11
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: OT: Hypershade changes in Maya 2016


 The node editor remembers the last graph when you reopen it.  Tabs allow
 you to remember multiple graphs.
  On Apr 13, 2015 11:02 AM, Ognjen Vukovic ognj...@gmail.com wrote:
  What irkes me is the fact that you need to create tabs to save your
 network graph lay out. This should just be default instead of drawing

Re: OT: Lab for 3DSMax

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Why would anyone bother when they could use Fabric for free for the same
thing and also have it go across packages?
The now you can be a programmer too! video style, complete with royalty
free music loop, also made me throw up a bit in the back of my mouth :p

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 10:48 AM, pedro santos probi...@gmail.com wrote:

 And a new video is out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmudH_C97O4

 When I saw the video this subconsciously jumped on my brain and I went
 back to be sure, ahaha.





 On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 this has been around for a while.

 No idea how involved it is.

 Would love to see the performance on really demanding scenes...

 It uses C# ?

 On 9 April 2015 at 14:43, pedro santos probi...@gmail.com wrote:

 So... Good bye ICE, long live ICE... sort of... Bifrost and now Lab?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAcid7AXGc4


 Has anyone tested it? Curious about the reach inside Max.

 Cheers





 --




 *--[image:
 http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s202/animatics/probiner-sig.gif]Pedro
 Alpiarça dos Santos Animator  3DModeler  Illustrator 
 http://probiner.x10.mx/ http://probiner.x10.mx/*





 --




 *--[image:
 http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s202/animatics/probiner-sig.gif]Pedro
 Alpiarça dos Santos Animator  3DModeler  Illustrator 
 http://probiner.x10.mx/ http://probiner.x10.mx/*




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: OT: Lab for 3DSMax

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I have to admit to never having got the hang of MAX.
I produced work professionally with Soft, LW, XSI, Maya, Houdini... MAX I
never got, it's like it was made for some other species than humans AFAIC.

If MAX tastes like anything, I imagine it would taste like boiled broccoli
left in the sun for a couple weeks.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 11:47 AM, pedro santos probi...@gmail.com wrote:

 That MAX taste right? x)
 But it touches some soft spots for me. Deformation and topology operations.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5NXLDjH1sfeature=youtu.be

 On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 2:15 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Why would anyone bother when they could use Fabric for free for the same
 thing and also have it go across packages?
 The now you can be a programmer too! video style, complete with royalty
 free music loop, also made me throw up a bit in the back of my mouth :p

Re: Linux GUI weirdness

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I can't say I find it crippled to be honest, and these days I find it
pretty hard to work on WIndows :)
CentOS isn't, admittedly, the most complete or attractive desktop system,
but still... at least you have a decent windows manager, configurability,
performance (considerable difference), better networking, multiple
desktops...
 I can't wait for win 10, 8 and 7 are bloody prehistoric.
Lack of photoshop is really the only drawback these days, of you need it.

On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Andreas Bystrom andreas.byst...@gmail.com
wrote:

 out of curiosity, what is the point in running linux if you are a small
 softimage shop? I use linux every day here and can certainly see the
 advantage for a big studio, but if softimage is your main app, why run an
 OS that cripples it?





 On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 4:52 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 hmm, you mean XSI's own sub windows outside the main client's? XSI does
 maximize to both monitors and snap, but honestly I don't even notice it
 anymore if I want to work on just one monitor, I just meta + middle mouse
 resize it on opening, after that I can move any window outside and over the
 desktop. That's on CentOS 6.2 to 6.6.
 If you mean dragging it off desktop, no, I don't believe it's possible, X
 lets the client window control that behaviour and I suspect mainwin, or
 whatever else deals with the windowing, has it disabled.

 On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Simon van de Lagemaat 
 si...@theembassyvfx.com wrote:

 We had the same problem and found out the font that Soft was searching
 for, it was something odd.  I'll find out what it was on Monday and let you
 know how we fixed it.  In fact I don't think we ever got a check but
 instead it was some odd looking shape.

 The other massive annoyance was how Soft wants to maximise across
 monitors and you can't drag a window off the screen, they just bump up
 against the edges :-/, this is centos 6 however.

 On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks Luc-Eric...

 I am not sure where to start investigating on the font subject, any
 pointers? but the window server tip can get me started.

 On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 The missing checkmark in the spreadsheet control is something about
 font substitution.  It's not a bitmap that's used, it's the checkmark
 symbol.  In.. Arial font, perhaps.  For the keyboard and the focus,
 I'm sure something can be fixed by fiddling with the window server's
 focus-follow-mouse setting.  You might need to install something to
 get access to those settings.

 On 3 April 2015 at 17:46, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:




 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Linux distro ?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

go for a certified system if licensing is a priority. CentOS or RH, or FC

On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 9:02 AM, Henry Katz hk-v...@iscs-i.com wrote:

 Currently serving on Centos 6.5.


 On 04/05/2015 03:00 PM, Martin wrote:

 I'm considering using an old machine I have, put some Linux in it and use
 it as a server for my Autodesk licenses. What distro would you recommend ?
 My main objective is just the licenses at first, and using it as a
 rendering server and some other services later.

 Thanks.

 Martin
 Sent from my iPhone





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Linux GUI weirdness

[Raffaele Fragapane]

hmm, you mean XSI's own sub windows outside the main client's? XSI does
maximize to both monitors and snap, but honestly I don't even notice it
anymore if I want to work on just one monitor, I just meta + middle mouse
resize it on opening, after that I can move any window outside and over the
desktop. That's on CentOS 6.2 to 6.6.
If you mean dragging it off desktop, no, I don't believe it's possible, X
lets the client window control that behaviour and I suspect mainwin, or
whatever else deals with the windowing, has it disabled.

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Simon van de Lagemaat 
si...@theembassyvfx.com wrote:

 We had the same problem and found out the font that Soft was searching
 for, it was something odd.  I'll find out what it was on Monday and let you
 know how we fixed it.  In fact I don't think we ever got a check but
 instead it was some odd looking shape.

 The other massive annoyance was how Soft wants to maximise across monitors
 and you can't drag a window off the screen, they just bump up against the
 edges :-/, this is centos 6 however.

 On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks Luc-Eric...

 I am not sure where to start investigating on the font subject, any
 pointers? but the window server tip can get me started.

 On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 The missing checkmark in the spreadsheet control is something about
 font substitution.  It's not a bitmap that's used, it's the checkmark
 symbol.  In.. Arial font, perhaps.  For the keyboard and the focus,
 I'm sure something can be fixed by fiddling with the window server's
 focus-follow-mouse setting.  You might need to install something to
 get access to those settings.

 On 3 April 2015 at 17:46, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Linux GUI weirdness

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I can't tell you how to fix it, but I can tell you we're on CentOS and all
those things work, so at least you know they are fixable.
Things like supra and alt are often related to automated key press interval
suppression, auto focus, and holding down alt (change it to meta, the
windows key) to resize or move windows.

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hello,

 So we are switching over to Linux (CentOS) and we are learning a lot and
 are finding some weird stuff. I guess it is to be expected since Softimage
 wasn't really developed with Linux in mind from the start but here are some
 of the oddities, if anyone can confirm these or provide some suggestion for
 a workaround or fix, I would be forever grateful.

 pass options  render channel grid/spreadsheet doesn't show the check mark?

 lots of issues with views loosing focus causing shortcuts to get re routed
 to the main application. for example, i use the array keys in the explorer
 view a lot and they get redirected to the main application causing either a
 frame to jump or playback to start. really really annoying on production
 scenes.

 supra key mode not working? I can't press and hold a key to have it
 temporarily go into that mode then on release return to the previous mode.

 Thanks
 Steven




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE Custom ICE Data type not exposing in compound?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You might also need to add something to the compound xml or an event, I
have very hazy memories of work-arounds and stuff, but that was for
multiple ports bundled into port groups (incidentally something that JUST
came up at work, again, today).

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 The node behaves as you would expect when you add more port instances and
 when it isn't inside a compound.

 The port is defined last, I will try and move it around, but the node is
 so simple I would just be putting it first. The Syflex node I referenced
 has the force ports in the middle. Might be onto something there

 My current (not completely tested) work around is to change the port
 definition to support an array instead of instances and put a build array
 node in between the custom node and the exposed port.

 Bummer...
 Steven

 *written with my thumbs
 On Mar 31, 2015 4:45 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 Does it work if it's outside a compound?

 I have had some issues with dynamically adding ports to groups, some of
 them pretty bug smelling, but all of them, including one with custom data
 types, disappear if the group with dynamic ports is the last one in the
 definition. You could also try and give that a shot, but it's more of a
 head in the sand workaround than a fix for anything.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE Custom ICE Data type not exposing in compound?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Does it work if it's outside a compound?

I have had some issues with dynamically adding ports to groups, some of
them pretty bug smelling, but all of them, including one with custom data
types, disappear if the group with dynamic ports is the last one in the
definition. You could also try and give that a shot, but it's more of a
head in the sand workaround than a fix for anything.

Re: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I don't know, Luc-Eric can be biased as he seems happy with AD, unlike the
developers that left, but you got to appreciate the fact checking you get
out of his presence here.
There is enough bias in the other direction anyway since AD isn't exactly
well loved, so I find his contributions bring good balance. I'll take the
occasional drizzled up parade in exchange for that.

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 You don't have to rain on our imaginary parade Luc-Eric.

 On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 I don't know about that 5k number;  the potential Cinema4D/softimage
 overlap is probably around 1500 seats total.

 After SI|3D, Alain was working out of Japan in consulting and not
 directly on the XSI product; he contributed the older user normal
 editing tool that was in the netview.

 On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Oliver Weingarten li...@pixelpanic.de
 wrote:
  ...maybe 15k potential users seems to be an inetresting amount for other
  companies than AD ;)
 
  ...fingers crossed somebody comes up with something coming even close to
  good old  XSI..!
 
  Am 18.03.2015 um 16:27 schrieb Stephan Haitz:
 
  Could it be there are set free quite other energies with the EOL of
  Softimage than intented?
 
  Am 18.03.2015 um 14:24 schrieb Ed Harriss:
 
  Maxon… as in Maxon Cinema4D?
 
  If so, exciting!
 
 
 
  I’ve been using C4D and it’s got some really, really great stuff but
 there
  are a few areas that could use some Softimage style love. ;)
 
  Regardless, we are working on integrating it into our pipeline.
 
  Ed
 
  From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
  [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Greg
 Punchatz
  Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 9:14 AM
  To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
  Subject: Maxon sets up shop in Montreal
 
 
 
  Ex softie Alain Laferrière leading a new dev team :)
 
 
 





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini

[Raffaele Fragapane]

For anybody following this who's still on the fence let me put it simply:
If you're used to XSI, and you have to do deformation work with Maya's OOTB
toolset you either are insane, or about to go insane very quickly.

Rig authoring and animation are mostly fine, but when it comes to
deformation there is very, very little in Maya out of the box, and what is
there is supported by tools and workflow that will age you a year in a
month of use; when they don't break they are still painful, and it's not
very often that they don't break.

If you have to do it, and are proficient enough to clobber deformers and
some helper tools together but not enough to write C++ close enough to the
metal for it to perform, start learning Fabric. In fact, start learning
Fabric anyway if you do rigging.
If you have to do it, and are more of the artistic persuasion, see if you
can change your role to something else, anything between animation and
potato farming will do, and have the company hire someone who only worked
in Maya before for that kind of work and is therefore unaware of how much
pain he's in.


On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 8:07 AM, Manuel Huertas Marchena 
lito...@hotmail.com wrote:

 Curiously I ve been reading the transition guides you kindly wrote lately,
 thanks Jordi!
  I am sure that Houdini provides the scalability and resources to be an
 end to end solution.  But for the time being that
 decision is not up to me. At AF we have a katana(vray)  maya pipe.
 Houdini is used for hero fx stuff. Its on my plans to
 try and create a production ready asset to show production (once I figure
 out how to create something actually useful!)
  and only then see the plausibility of using Houdini for environment work
 (as an additional tool... who knows then..). As this concept is still a
 bit new (although I know its not the case...)  I have not seen much cg
 environment pipelines based on this software if at all. The only case I am
 aware is rising sun pictures... but I dont know someone there atm. I ve
 seen houdini used in videogames environments... but dont have much examples
 of that for film (not talking about fx of course), I am guessing that the
 main idea is somehow similar... *?*!

 cheers


 -Manu



 IMDB http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4755969/ | Portfolio
 http://envmanu.com http://envmanu.carbonmade.com/| Vimeo
 http://vimeo.com/manuelhuertasmarchena | Linkedin
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelhuertas


 --
 From: byronn...@gmail.com
 Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 16:14:34 -0400
 Subject: Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com


 How are you finding your new found Houdini knowledge to be fitting into
 the needs of the marketplace? Are there many shops adopting it? Or are you
 a lone wolf or able to turnkey shots for people? I too have found Maya
 unintuitive and uninspiring. Houdini looks interesting but I'm wary of
 jumping on something that I'll never get to use. Unlike many of you here, I
 am in a small market so there aren't many 3D jobs to go around.

 On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Simon Reeves si...@simonreeves.com
 wrote:

 I always worry that Houdini is not such a friendly app to be used as
 a 'backbone' as you (Jordi) phrase it.
 But I'm basing that on the logic that most of our 3d artists will HAVE to
 use it, but that's not really the case...

 I've started to settle into the idea that maya is OK for being the
 base, (after some love) so perhaps this is the moment I need to give
 Houdini a proper look before I fall down into the abyss of Maya.


 On Tuesday, 17 March 2015, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 That certainly is a great approach but even better is if you go in the
 other direction, use Houdini as the backbone and render from
 Mantra/Arnold/Octane/PRMan/3Dlight/whatever as the FX live inside Houdini
 and therefore it is the natural backbone.

 Ultimately you will be using a myriad of tools that will funnel “dumb”
 cached data (just baked geometry, particles with attributes and little
 more) to Houdini and from there you are free to assemble your scenes as you
 need to.

 Furthermore, if you need to scale you will find Houdini excels at that so
 imho it is a no brainer.

 hope it helps

 jb


 On 17 Mar 2015, at 18:15, Manuel Huertas Marchena lito...@hotmail.com
 wrote:

 I am wondering if any of you guys working in film use houdini for digital
 asset production, or is it still more of a fx tool for most part? (having
 said that I do realize that houdini is not and end to end solution or all
 kinds of assets, but still I feel that there is a lot of stuff that
 could/can be created using  a procedural approach,
 ex: buildings, concept modeling, snow, rocks, trees, props...etc..)




 --


 Simon Reeves
 London, UK
 *si...@simonreeves.com si...@simonreeves.com*
 *www.simonreeves.com http://www.simonreeves.com*
 *www.analogstudio.co.uk http://www.analogstudio.co.uk*





-- 
Our users will know fear and 

Re: BSuite - BStudio -- BUF Software

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I wonder if the UI is still an identical clone to the old Soft|3D and
whether they added polygons or not :)
The original B-Studio was bastardized BPatches only and it was heavily
targeted towards photogrammetry and tracking.

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

  On 03/09/15 12:42, Sebastien Sterling wrote:

 would really nee to lnow what it's like.
 i seem to remember Maguff having its on propitiatory software, which
 eventually got phased out for maya and renderman.


 Me too can't wait to see performance, usability ... and wonder about their
 renderer, (path tracing performance,  etc..)
 .. if they will open-up to other renders, and how is their SDK  (in
 general, or not to mention for eventual Fabric support)
 how the different modules work together..

 Otherwise it would be funny if it turned out to be more awkward,
 unforgiving,  or more complicated than the few (or essentially the *one*)
 other currently available high-end solution(s).

 But I would seriously doubt that, from what can be gathered to date, it
 should at least be considerably refined and straight forward,
 especially considering that it's very much like a born in production,
 production software.

 Along with what seems to be it's own shotgun, among the other modules
 that seem to cover many or most production aspects while all being made  to
 work together.

 Unless that perception was largely from myth, which I'd hardly think so
 ...
 (imagine Soft without even Avid, where it was perhaps less, but also
 like a stepchild, how it would have been treated.. represented  cared
 for...
 and how that would have affected adoption/perception)

 Looks a bit like Houdini in terms of them remaining themselves, with all
 the way up to management being into it
 (except with perhaps more of a hands-on production side to them)

 I think the edge of Both Softimage (3D) and uptil now XSI, is that while
 being advanced, they were (arguably quite a bit more than others)
 made and refined (all the way down to little silly details) with
 everyday production in mind, simplifying procedures,
 and making things super sturdy in however unconventional way they are
 used.
 I don't know in the later years, but I recall how at least through special
 projects, how we were in constant back and forth between various shops,
 and with at least some product managers being somewhat artsy themselves.

 And I would hope (while being rather confident) this solution would also
 have such an edge,
 and wouldn't be surprised seeing it become the only other one, other than
 the only other (non-specialized) one.

 The only caveat I see to date, is the exclusive Linux/Mac support, which
 if it indeed turned out to be really great,
 I would go for booting in Linux, and Virtualboxing Windows for other
 secondary things. (and/or perhaps later-on, no Windows at all)

 (fingers crossed)




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You can already do both those things with Fabric + SPLICE and you've been
able to for quite a while.
Canvas gives SPLICEed contents a visual interface, things that could be
done before can still be done.

On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 3:42 AM, Nono nnois...@gmail.com wrote:

 This looks awesome,
 What's the possibilities provided with extensions shipped with fabric 2.0 ?
 Did this provide for example what we need to build a simulated particle
 cloud, or nodes needed to work modeling like extrude/bevel ?

 Noël

 On 9 March 2015 at 17:27, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 so... if it can be spliced, it can be canvased :)

 neat.

 On 9 March 2015 at 15:47, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

  Okay. I find that encouraging thanks (and Congratz!!)


 On 03/09/15 11:42, Paul Doyle wrote:

 We've successfully hooked Fabric into a bunch of different applications
 already - there are certain app-specific idiosyncrasies but it's been fine
 so far. Most SDKs give us what we need. Canvas is just a different
 interface for writing KL - the hooks are largely the same (actually simpler
 than before due to some design changes).


 On 9 March 2015 at 11:36, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:

  This indeed at least at first glance looks like (an early incarnation
 of) everything ICE is, if not more.

 Though considering how Maya's API is one of the most open
 (contrasting with it's general, sometimes almost crippling awkwardness
 for (the few) that that have gotten the chance to know how things could be
 different)

 I seriously hope that integration using other environments api's would
 not be any less seemless, than however seemless integration is in Maya.
 or at least not to a point of defeating the purpose of it being DCC
 agnostic.

 I guess my questions is.. Is it possible that authoring could only
 mostly be done in Maya? (and then only or mostly be run in other 
 solutions?)

 *Because Maya,  (...)*


 On 03/09/15 4:22, Gerbrand Nel wrote:

 Not long at all IMHO.
 You guys seem to be screetching past the other team, loud music
 blaring, waving obscene gestures out of the window.
  More power to you!!i

 Can't wait to try this out :)
 G
 On 07/03/2015 17:44, Paul Doyle wrote:

 Thanks for the kind words - this was what we originally intended to
 build before we went off on a bit of a tangent :) I think code first has
 proved to be the right path, but man it's taken a long time to get to the
 visual programming!

 On 7 March 2015 at 10:17, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote:

 Finally I have a good excuse to start developing stuff with Fabric :)

  Can't wait to try it!
 From a non-coder point pf view, seriously, thanks guys!

 2015-03-07 14:43 GMT+01:00 Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com:

 btw the sign up is here:
 http://fabricengine.com/canvas-testing-program/

 On 6 March 2015 at 20:14, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 I don't write this word often, but being from Texas there is only
 thing that comes to mindYeehaw!

 On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 6:03 PM, Vince Baertsoen vi...@themill.com
 wrote:

  Awesome news!

  I have been waiting for this for ever. Exciting time!

  Thanks a lot Paul and I am looking forward to trying it,
 hopefully soon.

  Cheers.



 Vince Baertsoen
 Head of 3D

 T  +1 212 337 3210 %2B1%20212%20337%203210




 The Mill 451 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York,  NY 10013


 *themill.com | http://www.themill.com/ themillblog.com |
 http://www.themillblog.com/ @millchannel |
 https://twitter.com/millchannel facebook.com/millchannel
 http://www.facebook.com/millchannel *
  --
 *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Paul Doyle [
 technove...@gmail.com]
 *Sent:* Friday, March 06, 2015 3:32 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric
 Engine 2.0

Hi guys - I know you've been waiting for quite a while for us
 to start showing you what we've been up to since Siggraph. Finally 
 we're
 there and can give you a look :)

  I'm really happy and proud to give you the first proper look at
 Canvas, our visual programming system for Fabric 2.0.

  Quick highlight video: https://vimeo.com/121492305

  Tons more information here: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-videos/

  This is the first part of the FE2.0 plan, and we'll be showing
 this in more detail at GTC on March 18th - please contact me if you 
 want to
 meet up.

  Looking forward to hearing what you have to say, and hopefully
 getting you on the alpha/beta when we open things up (there is a sign 
 up
 form on the Canvas page).

  Cheers,

  Paul and the rest of the Fabric team














-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Fabric Canvas IK Solver

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Maya offers local as just Matrix/XForm, parent can be looped back without
dependency issues, and world as world. Most are also offered with their
inverse counterpart paired.
The input into a transform node has to always be in terms of the local
triple of triplets, which can be annoying, but again that loopable parent
port makes it slightly less of a pain as it's easy enough to deal with it
even if your work is always in global space.

In ICE you can only use the world matrix, and there is no introspection to
retrieve a bundled parent port, or scene outrospection to do the same by
traversing one up, which means you have to explicitly fetch the parent and
change it if your hierarchy changed. Kind of the inverse of Maya in terms
of which of the two, but same deal in terms of being bound to one space. Of
the two XSI tends to be the more consistent when it comes to ICE, but again
it does miss the intro and outrspoection capabilities of Maya (which is
relatively normal, ICE tends to have high locality, Maya nodes are scene
wide).

Maya doesn't really have that problem at a DG level (parent), but in
another thread people apparently hated the fact it had a convenience port
that frees you from manually tracking child state of nodes, and the DG
seems to be confused for the DAG entirely too often ;)

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 9:57 AM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 nope, i don't know...

 On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 3:44 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Yes my scene was flat so it was all done in world space.

 I'm really not sure if you have access to world and local in Maya. Happen
 to know Mr. Caron? :)

 Eric T.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric Engine 2.0

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Surely Bifrost is what you aspire for your product to be when it grows up,
right? ;)

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 5:41 AM, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote:

 That's what the alpha is for :) We aren't wedded to a particular design,
 and we're drawing inspiration from modern systems like Blueprint.

Re: parenting in Softimage vs. Maya.....confusion

[Raffaele Fragapane]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 2:41 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
wrote:



 In Maya, it's the Shape node that contains the geometry, and the
 Transform node places it in the 3d word, with the additional twist
 that you can put multiple shapes under the same transform. I'm not
 really aware of any problem with this, but people tend to build
 legends around things they don't often see.


Sure, and you also have multiple transforms owning the same shape for
instancing, which often confuses the hell out of people, however
technically correct it is :)

As for multiple shapes under a transform, there have been genuine issues
with it in the past with it, and some remain, though the ones that remain
are mostly in custom tools, hacks, and people's heads.

One is that Maya's auto-naming can easily turn inconsistent or hard to
parse if shapes move in and out of different transnforms and start being
mulitple-per, so a lot of cheapo in-house scripts tended to fail in that
case, and it doesn't help that there are no valid events to monitor and
catch parenting (that I know of, I should add) to gate that, whereas
creation is obviously a lot easier to gate keep.

The other thing is that a lot of tools use simpler than they should
implementations to deal with shapes (extendToShape to the first shape)
instead of contemplating multiple shape per transform cases, and therefore
leave a mess behind or refuse to work in the multiple shapes per transform
scenario, but that's not Maya's fault.

All in all it's not really an issue with Maya. We do use multiple shapes
and instanced shapes (the only way to emulate Soft proxies, really), and
have no issues with it, but this is now, years ago it was a lot worse, and
that rep stuck.

It's also true that moving shapes around in Maya or manually instancing
requires you use scripts, the UI and the availale commands are ill suited
to handling it.

Re: akeytsu animation software demo

[Raffaele Fragapane]

A perfect world would contain no animators. I therefore agree with you :)

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 9:11 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Rigging should not exist in a perfect world, how is hat for a
 controversial statement?

 ;)

 jb

Re: akeytsu animation software demo

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Animators themselves are probably the ones crippling the rigging paradigm,
not the other way around ;) That's half the reason.
The other half is that 90% of TDs out there who would struggle to find
their arse with both hands tied behind their back and an anatomical atlas
open on the Gluteus Maximus page taped to their face.

Maya, in small part, is responsible for having formed that generation of
hacks with MEL and a number of other factors, but all in all I strongly
believe the people are to blame for the state of things, not the software
houses.

There is no user base more resistant to change in the whole industry that
I've ever seen than the coupling of animators and riggers who think
scripting a blend is the height of technical achievement.

Here's my controversial statement for the month, just in time for the end
of it ;)

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 The whole rigging paradigm is simply crippling animators and pimping it
 does not really help, this part of our workflow should change massively and
 I see akeytsu as the the first of many to come.

 It is insanity the level of micromanagement required to build a human rig,
 it is time for packages to provide such primitive objects and be able to
 play like lego with them.

 The fact that some rigging TD uses M

Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You can select what appears in the hotbox and what doesn't already, Joey,
and you can customise marking menus (which respond to gesture) which are
even quicker.

Maya's UI is, in most places, borderline disgraceful, the hotbox and the
gesture driven contextual menus are not those places.

Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's true, Maya doesn't respond to cleverness. It's like trying to be
sharply sarcastic with a  slow witted, mean spirited six year old, he will
just stare at you and kick you in the nuts.
When I have to use Maya from the UI end of things I just assume I am
confronting a malicious, starved and retarded puma that wishes me ill, and
behave accordingly. I also give all skinning tasks to other people.

On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 9:32 AM, w...@fiftyeight.com w...@fiftyeight.com
wrote:

   so at the end,  this means:
  A softimage-user switching to Maya thinks he is clever ... and thats the
 problem.

  Walter

Re: ICE Node Database Invalid Error

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Thanks Matt,
It's not related in this case, I managed to suppress the database error,
but I still have problems with mis-typed and stale typed ports n the ice
context.

At this point it's got some really bizarre connotations.

For the record the above is all persisting even if I not only restart the
app, but also nuke the preferences and burn incense at the four corners of
the desk.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote:

 I have experienced that behavior with PPG logic for custom plugins and
 shaders.  Usually happens when performing some illegal command and
 Softimage ducks for cover to protect itself from crashing.  Whatever
 internal data Softimage was managing gets corrupted/deleted and you must
 restart the application to rebuild it to continue work.  Whatever the
 issue, the internal data seems to be dynamically built.  On the rare chance
 you have to deal with .spdl and related bits, you might want to flush your
 .spdlindex file in your user profile as a last resort, but don’t touch it
 if you don't have to.

 Matt




 Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:39:35 -
 From: raff riffr...@gmail.com
 Subject: ICE Node Database Invalid Error
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com


 Hey folks,

 I'm getting some very weird behaviour with a node where XSI issues a
 warning on reload that the database for ICE Nodes is invalid followed by
 the name of the node I'm prototyping.

 The node definition behaves erratically, with me having had to change
 things such as the names of the callbacks or the port group ID for
 parameters to actually reflect changes, otherwise they would do weird stuff
 like appearing in the PPG as the right type (or not appear at all), but
 actually internally be flagged as a different parameter (with related error
 about mis-matching CDataArray type, such as a parameter that's clearly a
 float insisting it's a matrix).

 Anybody ever encountered anything like it and has an idea if and how this
 database can be purged or what would lead to these issues? It's making for
 dev hell.

 Cheers,

 Raff




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE Node Database Invalid Error

[Raffaele Fragapane]

The actual error, in case it's of any help:
' WARNING : 3000 - Operator database invalid: NameOfNode  this changes if
I rename the node, obviously enough

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Hey folks,

 I'm getting some very weird behaviour with a node where XSI issues a
 warning on reload that the database for ICE Nodes is invalid followed by
 the name of the node I'm prototyping.

 The node definition behaves erratically, with me having had to change
 things such as the names of the callbacks or the port group ID for
 parameters to actually reflect changes, otherwise they would do weird stuff
 like appearing in the PPG as the right type (or not appear at all), but
 actually internally be flagged as a different parameter (with related error
 about mis-matching CDataArray type, such as a parameter that's clearly a
 float insisting it's a matrix).

 Anybody ever encountered anything like it and has an idea if and how this
 database can be purged or what would lead to these issues? It's making for
 dev hell.

 Cheers,
 Raff

 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

ICE Node Database Invalid Error

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Hey folks,

I'm getting some very weird behaviour with a node where XSI issues a
warning on reload that the database for ICE Nodes is invalid followed by
the name of the node I'm prototyping.

The node definition behaves erratically, with me having had to change
things such as the names of the callbacks or the port group ID for
parameters to actually reflect changes, otherwise they would do weird stuff
like appearing in the PPG as the right type (or not appear at all), but
actually internally be flagged as a different parameter (with related error
about mis-matching CDataArray type, such as a parameter that's clearly a
float insisting it's a matrix).

Anybody ever encountered anything like it and has an idea if and how this
database can be purged or what would lead to these issues? It's making for
dev hell.

Cheers,
Raff

-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE Node Database Invalid Error

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Did that, and it sorted no effect.
At this point it seems growing ports in a group that are at the bottom of
the deck is simply bugged, or has some very well hidden solution somewhere
that's not obvious to users.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Hsiao Ming Chia 
hsiao.ming.c...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Hi,

 Could you try deleting all the .cachedat and .cachehdr files in your
 Autodesk/Softimage folder in your user directory?
 These files serve as a cache for ICE node definitions and maybe they got
 de-synced somehow.

 Thanks,
 Hsiao Ming

Re: ICE Node Database Invalid Error

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I've found what it is actually, if anybody else ever bumps into it.
Having a growable set of grouped ports at the top of the def will grow
its types into subsequent ports instead of moving the stack upwards from
the bottom.
It's a bit hard to explain, but all I can say for now is that if you have
port groups that can grow and multiple groups, they can interact in nasty
ways, so make sure you always sort growables bottom-most. It might be me
not doing the right thing or not knowing another prescribed way to do it,
but nonetheless this is insidious as hell.


On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:50 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Thanks Matt,
 It's not related in this case, I managed to suppress the database error,
 but I still have problems with mis-typed and stale typed ports n the ice
 context.

 At this point it's got some really bizarre connotations.

 For the record the above is all persisting even if I not only restart the
 app, but also nuke the preferences and burn incense at the four corners of
 the desk.

 On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote:

 I have experienced that behavior with PPG logic for custom plugins and
 shaders.  Usually happens when performing some illegal command and
 Softimage ducks for cover to protect itself from crashing.  Whatever
 internal data Softimage was managing gets corrupted/deleted and you must
 restart the application to rebuild it to continue work.  Whatever the
 issue, the internal data seems to be dynamically built.  On the rare chance
 you have to deal with .spdl and related bits, you might want to flush your
 .spdlindex file in your user profile as a last resort, but don’t touch it
 if you don't have to.

 Matt




 Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:39:35 -
 From: raff riffr...@gmail.com
 Subject: ICE Node Database Invalid Error
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com


 Hey folks,

 I'm getting some very weird behaviour with a node where XSI issues a
 warning on reload that the database for ICE Nodes is invalid followed by
 the name of the node I'm prototyping.

 The node definition behaves erratically, with me having had to change
 things such as the names of the callbacks or the port group ID for
 parameters to actually reflect changes, otherwise they would do weird stuff
 like appearing in the PPG as the right type (or not appear at all), but
 actually internally be flagged as a different parameter (with related error
 about mis-matching CDataArray type, such as a parameter that's clearly a
 float insisting it's a matrix).

 Anybody ever encountered anything like it and has an idea if and how this
 database can be purged or what would lead to these issues? It's making for
 dev hell.

 Cheers,

 Raff




 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Maya, sheesh!

[Raffaele Fragapane]

That is only an issue for compiled stuff, anything where the actual plugin
is Python/MEL (which includes those where Python fronts the plugin and the
use of compiled libraries that don't link to the API libs is through Python
bindings) will always go across versions fine unless the SDK itself had
compatibility breaking changes between releases, and that's exceedingly
rare, even deprecated stuff tends to stay around for years).

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 12:26 AM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
 wrote:

 The problem with all those tools is that as soon as maya 2016 is out they
 are not compatible anymore. And in case someone stops the development of a
 plugin you start from scratch.

 2015-02-11 11:29 GMT+01:00 Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com:

  Attempts don’t equal results.
 Welcome to hell... enjoy your stay.


 On 11/02/2015 10:11, Sebastien Sterling wrote:

  Is this really, yet another thing to lookout for ? i thought some
 attempts where made to harmonize curves across the board.

  a few versions back they added normalize curves in Y.

 On 11 February 2015 at 07:15, Laurence Dodd laure...@porkpie.tv wrote:

 Thank for these, I'll take a look.
 I suppose I just have to get out of assuming that basic functionality
 will be in the program, and start looking for scripts and plugins before I
 look for a way maya should be able to do something out of the box.

 On 10 February 2015 at 21:42, Laurence Dodd laure...@porkpie.tv wrote:

 Hi all,
 I'm trying to do the Maya thing.
 Is there some way to get it's graph editor to behave more like Soft's,
 specifically can I edit keys and their tangents without going through
 twenty hoops to let me simply adjust stuff. If I had any hair I would be
 tearing it out, instead I'll just die a little inside every time I have to
 go to key transform tool or click on multiple things to pull on a tangent.

  Sorry rant over


 --

 Laurence Dodd
 Porkpie Animation
  E: laure...@porkpie.tv
 W: www.porkpie.tv
 M: 07570 702 576
 T: 01273 278 382




  --

 Laurence Dodd
 Porkpie Animation
  E: laure...@porkpie.tv
 W: www.porkpie.tv
 M: 07570 702 576
 T: 01273 278 382







-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya beta

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Unless the beta breaks binary compatibility in the cycle, which is rare,
usually not, not across PRs at least. They only need recompiling across
major versions and, rarely, with some 0.5s (last time was 2013.5).

You should post beta related questions in the beta forums though, you're
not supposed to be discussing details of it publicly, even just involvement.

On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 3:46 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com wrote:

 Most likely.

 
 Eric Thivierge
 http://www.ethivierge.com

 On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 8:08 AM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
  wrote:

 Cause I am in the beta but I almost never use it (for a simple reason) I
 thought I ask here.

 Would plugins actually need to be compiled against every single beta
 release ?
 I just can't see me using maya out of the box.





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya beta

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I've never seen it enforced or even seen wrists slapped privately, but if
you want to stick rigidly to something you signed then yes, it's supposed
to be a blanket coverage AFAIK. At the very least discussion about it
should be reserved entirely to dedicated areas that they have control over.

On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
wrote:

 *even just involvement.*

 Really ? Alright good to know.

 2015-02-07 15:49 GMT+01:00 Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 :

 Unless the beta breaks binary compatibility in the cycle, which is rare,
 usually not, not across PRs at least. They only need recompiling across
 major versions and, rarely, with some 0.5s (last time was 2013.5).

 You should post beta related questions in the beta forums though, you're
 not supposed to be discussing details of it publicly, even just involvement.

 On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 3:46 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Most likely.

 
 Eric Thivierge
 http://www.ethivierge.com

 On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 8:08 AM, Mario Reitbauer 
 cont...@marioreitbauer.at wrote:

 Cause I am in the beta but I almost never use it (for a simple reason)
 I thought I ask here.

 Would plugins actually need to be compiled against every single beta
 release ?
 I just can't see me using maya out of the box.





 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Subscription Transition for New Software Licenses

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's very possible the distinction will one day become closed source as
service VS OSS, and the wedge of perennial licenses inbetween will be
nearly non-existent offerings wise.
With the increase in computation as a service rather than a hard commodity
kept in air conditioned rooms those two licensing models work well,
licenses tied to CPUs don't.

They do need to revise the price points though, or provide immensely better
service and updates to individuals, coupled with a much, much smoother and
easier transition for third parties and a more stable platform.

If upgrading Maya keeps being the Russian roulette with 5 bullets for 6
chambers of the last four or five versions, and every time a developer
farts you have to fall back to aging tool chains (updated every 8 or so
years), and recompile your plugins only to find half of them broken by the
changes, things won't go well.
Hopefully they will have enough time to rein the lot in and make it work.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 12:51 AM, Byron Nash byronn...@gmail.com wrote:

 Do you all not think that probably all software will go to a service
 model? Not that I'm entirely in favor one way or the other, it just seems
 like that's the way things are headed. I haven't minded the Adobe CC move
 that much. At least I can stay current and not have to bicker with the
 company about upgrades every year or so.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: @autodesk maya request

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You can argue either way whether Maya is an app where you can be productive
and agile or not, it certainly isn't intuitive though. You have to dredge
some of the stuff up from depths unfathomable some times.

You can always ask, at worst people won't answer. If you fear the questions
might be too frequent remember CGTalk has very active Maya forums and it's
perfectly acceptable to compile a list of questions and post a thread about
it even if it's once a day.

As for rotate globally, I imagine you mean global in Soft? So World
aligned? If you open the tool settings you have several options, without
Maya in front of me right now I'm not sure, but I think there's a combo
called Axis or Axis orientation, and you should be able to change it to
world.
If you want to orient around world centre instead you will have to move the
pivot, the shortcut for that is insert, and holding down X allows to snap
to grid so you can snap your manipulation pivot to world centre easily.

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
wrote:

 In the end I don't care too much.
 It just feels embarrassing asking for stuff which is there but which you
 just didn't find.
 But as long as no one is annoyed by noobs like me asking for those things,
 then at least I am fine with it ;)

 Oh, I allways used ctrl-shift-right click to get into that menu you
 described :D Your way is less painful for my fingers.

 Now I got a last question. How do you enable rotation axis globally.
 Under Display the Transform Display is on per object base and in the
 preferences I didn't find anything to turn it on globally.

 2015-02-04 11:57 GMT+01:00 Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 :

 It is, but the problem with dexterity based workflows is that you're
 unlikely to bump into the literal category for it, wherever the stuff ends
 up being stashed in.
 QWERTY interaction mode, X and V for quick snap (grid/discrete and snap
 to point) and so on are hard to bump into unless you watch some tutorial or
 someone tells you.

 The same goes for several other shortcuts that every expert knows but
 every noob misses (shift changing the contextual menu on click), and some
 that even experts rarely seem to know about (hold down a manipulation
 shortcut like W and left click for a nice surprise, inline snapping
 options, swim UVs, tweak, discrete steps and the such).

 It doesn't help that, unlike XSI, Maya has no right click for tool
 options on icons. XSI's snapping is infinitely more intuitive and versatile
 largely on account of that.

 On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Mario Reitbauer 
 cont...@marioreitbauer.at wrote:

 Thanks a lot !
 Is this covered in the docs anywhere ??
 Feels stupid to not finding stuff like this.

 2015-02-04 11:26 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de:

 You can use the V shortcut but the object you want to snap to will have
 to
 have it´s selection handle, rotation pivot or whatever else you want to
 snap
 to enabled in it display properties.

 e.g., modify your display options globally to display these kinds of
 stuff for all
 objects, the selection or even on alternatively on a per object basis
 in it´s
 attribute editor.


 Am 04.02.2015 um 11:20 schrieb Mario Reitbauer:

  Snap to pivot/center in maya ?

 Please ?

 And no, not through some sort of menu or command. Just add another
 snapping option please which enables snapping to object pivots/centers.






 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: @autodesk maya request

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It is, but the problem with dexterity based workflows is that you're
unlikely to bump into the literal category for it, wherever the stuff ends
up being stashed in.
QWERTY interaction mode, X and V for quick snap (grid/discrete and snap to
point) and so on are hard to bump into unless you watch some tutorial or
someone tells you.

The same goes for several other shortcuts that every expert knows but every
noob misses (shift changing the contextual menu on click), and some that
even experts rarely seem to know about (hold down a manipulation shortcut
like W and left click for a nice surprise, inline snapping options, swim
UVs, tweak, discrete steps and the such).

It doesn't help that, unlike XSI, Maya has no right click for tool options
on icons. XSI's snapping is infinitely more intuitive and versatile largely
on account of that.

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
wrote:

 Thanks a lot !
 Is this covered in the docs anywhere ??
 Feels stupid to not finding stuff like this.

 2015-02-04 11:26 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de:

 You can use the V shortcut but the object you want to snap to will have to
 have it´s selection handle, rotation pivot or whatever else you want to
 snap
 to enabled in it display properties.

 e.g., modify your display options globally to display these kinds of
 stuff for all
 objects, the selection or even on alternatively on a per object basis in
 it´s
 attribute editor.


 Am 04.02.2015 um 11:20 schrieb Mario Reitbauer:

  Snap to pivot/center in maya ?

 Please ?

 And no, not through some sort of menu or command. Just add another
 snapping option please which enables snapping to object pivots/centers.






-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

As much as I'm ready to slam their skinning and mesh/stack handling (lack
thereof) any day of the year, their scene graph is actually quite good.
That graph is perfectly sensible to anybody with a rudimentary
understanding of graphs, and in general the graph offers a pretty good
representation of what is going on, and is not bad at all in terms of
handling, name spaces, and in what you can do with custom nodes. It's a
respectable balance between the actual operations under the hood (which if
you were to draw 1:1 are hard to make sense of for a non-programmer) and a
human readable graph.

Constraints in Maya may seem overwhelming and tricky, and they are
certainly slow, but they are a lot more powerful than Soft's have ever
been, and certainly more manageable (non renameable, non re-orderable,
overlapping non normalized stacks per object in Soft). What Maya lacks,
which everybody writes internally if they have the resources, are some
simpler transform hooks, something not too distant from what you could do
with ICE on transforms, but considerably more intuitive and performant than
Constraint nodes, something not really possible in Soft (where graphs and
operators tend to live in a scene item sized pen).

@Jordi: I routinely rig almost exclusively through the node editor and even
with thousands of nodes in a rig (which is the average for us) have no
issues tracking the operations. The NE itself is getting better, though it
needs a lot more to be truly smooth, but it has the potential to get there
if they don't suddenly stop working on it.
I have my ideas about what doesn't work and what is needed, but there's a
degree of overlap with things that have been shown in private demos and
betas, so I can't expand on that any further, apologies in advance for that.

The ONE thing I've always missed in Soft of Maya, literally the only one,
had always been the scene graph and its handling, and while with the HG/HS
mix it was powerful but absolutely F'ing impossible to handle, the NE does
a respectable job of presenting it, a semi-decent one for authoring, and
has the potential to get better.

Fair's fair ;)

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:31 PM, a...@andynicholas.com 
a...@andynicholas.com wrote:

  Oh god. I nearly threw up in my mouth looking at that ;) How would anyone
 ever
 know that hooking those nodes up like that would be a permissible
 operation?


 I'm sure this must make sense to someone, and I'd bet that there's some
 genius
 programming going on to make that work. But to me, that picture epitomises
 everything that is wrong with Maya.

 A




 On 02 February 2015 at 21:17 Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
 wrote:


  Hey guys
   Could someone explain me this ;)
   I just can't wrap my head around why, what, when is executed/calculated.
   And what is driving what.
 
 
 
 




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's also true that Maya will choke on its own vomit like a middle aged
rockstar for a number of constraints that Soft will simply breeze through.
On the other hand Maya makes it a good deal easier to work out certain sets
of connections and interactions that in Soft end up requiring a brittle set
of Jenga Style constraints.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Just to make sure nobody misreads this, the issue is not that
 constraints are more powerful in one app than another, but rather that
 there is no node GUI in Softimage to see its very similar looping
 connections.

 On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Raffaele Fragapane
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
  As much as I'm ready to slam their skinning and mesh/stack handling (lack
  thereof) any day of the year, their scene graph is actually quite good.
  That graph is perfectly sensible to anybody with a rudimentary
 understanding
  of graphs, and in general the graph offers a pretty good representation
 of
  what is going on, and is not bad at all in terms of handling, name
 spaces,
  and in what you can do with custom nodes. It's a respectable balance
 between
  the actual operations under the hood (which if you were to draw 1:1 are
 hard
  to make sense of for a non-programmer) and a human readable graph.
 
  Constraints in Maya may seem overwhelming and tricky, and they are
 certainly
  slow, but they are a lot more powerful than Soft's have ever been, and
  certainly more manageable (non renameable, non re-orderable, overlapping
 non
  normalized stacks per object in Soft). What Maya lacks, which everybody
  writes internally if they have the resources, are some simpler transform
  hooks, something not too distant from what you could do with ICE on
  transforms, but considerably more intuitive and performant than
 Constraint
  nodes, something not really possible in Soft (where graphs and operators
  tend to live in a scene item sized pen).
 
  @Jordi: I routinely rig almost exclusively through the node editor and
 even
  with thousands of nodes in a rig (which is the average for us) have no
  issues tracking the operations. The NE itself is getting better, though
 it
  needs a lot more to be truly smooth, but it has the potential to get
 there
  if they don't suddenly stop working on it.
  I have my ideas about what doesn't work and what is needed, but there's a
  degree of overlap with things that have been shown in private demos and
  betas, so I can't expand on that any further, apologies in advance for
 that.
 
  The ONE thing I've always missed in Soft of Maya, literally the only one,
  had always been the scene graph and its handling, and while with the
 HG/HS
  mix it was powerful but absolutely F'ing impossible to handle, the NE
 does a
  respectable job of presenting it, a semi-decent one for authoring, and
 has
  the potential to get better.
 
  Fair's fair ;)
 
  On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:31 PM, a...@andynicholas.com
  a...@andynicholas.com wrote:
 
   Oh god. I nearly threw up in my mouth looking at that ;) How would
 anyone
  ever
  know that hooking those nodes up like that would be a permissible
  operation?
 
 
  I'm sure this must make sense to someone, and I'd bet that there's some
  genius
  programming going on to make that work. But to me, that picture
 epitomises
  everything that is wrong with Maya.
 
  A
 
 
 
 
  On 02 February 2015 at 21:17 Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
 
  wrote:
 
 
   Hey guys
Could someone explain me this ;)
I just can't wrap my head around why, what, when is
   executed/calculated.
And what is driving what.
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
  --
  Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and
  let them flee like the dogs they are!




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I abuse bookmarks and some custom filters and related scripts. If I
selected all DG nodes in the scene and simply graphed them all out for a
shot with four digidoubles in it the power in the building would probably
go down, and every cat in a five miles radius would catch on fire, or make
love to a dog, or possibly both things at the same time. The dog wouldn't
be happy.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
wrote:

 I am going to need a picture of that in my wall…

 ;-)
 jb

  On 3 Feb 2015, at 15:14, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  @Jordi: I routinely rig almost exclusively through the node editor and
 even
  with thousands of nodes in a rig (which is the average for us) have no
  issues tracking the operations. The NE itself is getting better, though
 it
  needs a lot more to be truly smooth, but it has the potential to get
 there
  if they don't suddenly stop working on it.
  I have my ideas about what doesn't work and what is needed, but there's
 a
  degree of overlap with things that have been shown in private demos and
  betas, so I can't expand on that any further, apologies in advance for
 that.





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

When I'll be back at work I'll see if I can get a connection in a cat free
area and take a screenshot. I doubt it'll look like much though unless I
can also find a 4k monitor to open the pane on and take the screenshot from
:p

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:55 PM, John Richard Sanchez 
youngupstar...@gmail.com wrote:

 I would like to see what that looks like in the Hypergraph

 On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 I abuse bookmarks and some custom filters and related scripts. If I
 selected all DG nodes in the scene and simply graphed them all out for a
 shot with four digidoubles in it the power in the building would probably
 go down, and every cat in a five miles radius would catch on fire, or make
 love to a dog, or possibly both things at the same time. The dog wouldn't
 be happy.

 On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez 
 jordiba...@gmail.com wrote:

 I am going to need a picture of that in my wall…

 ;-)
 jb

  On 3 Feb 2015, at 15:14, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  @Jordi: I routinely rig almost exclusively through the node editor
 and even
  with thousands of nodes in a rig (which is the average for us) have no
  issues tracking the operations. The NE itself is getting better,
 though it
  needs a lot more to be truly smooth, but it has the potential to get
 there
  if they don't suddenly stop working on it.
  I have my ideas about what doesn't work and what is needed, but
 there's a
  degree of overlap with things that have been shown in private demos
 and
  betas, so I can't expand on that any further, apologies in advance
 for that.





 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!




 --
 www.johnrichardsanchez.com




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Well, you don't need to. It's not even limiting not doing it. That's why I
was saying it's not bad (though not perfect). You can select something of
interest and expand in depth from there incrementally, or select just a
couple items and lay out the path between them, and then the surrounding
path segments, in just a few clicks.

It's honestly quite good, and I've converted a few old school people to
working this way in the last year or so and once they get used to it none
of them goes back to something else.

It seriously lacks things such as compounds, and bookmarks need
improvements, and from an assettization point of view Houdini absolutely
stomps all over it, but for rigging it's quite functional.


On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
wrote:

 That may be my point, having to boil the ocean to be able to display a
 node network is kind of wrong… unless you are a dirty dog that is.

 ;)
 jb

 On 3 Feb 2015, at 15:27, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 I abuse bookmarks and some custom filters and related scripts. If I
 selected all DG nodes in the scene and simply graphed them all out for a
 shot with four digidoubles in it the power in the building would probably
 go down, and every cat in a five miles radius would catch on fire, or make
 love to a dog, or possibly both things at the same time. The dog wouldn't
 be happy.

 On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez 
 jordiba...@gmail.com wrote:

 I am going to need a picture of that in my wall…

 ;-)
 jb

  On 3 Feb 2015, at 15:14, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  @Jordi: I routinely rig almost exclusively through the node editor and
 even
  with thousands of nodes in a rig (which is the average for us) have no
  issues tracking the operations. The NE itself is getting better,
 though it
  needs a lot more to be truly smooth, but it has the potential to get
 there
  if they don't suddenly stop working on it.
  I have my ideas about what doesn't work and what is needed, but
 there's a
  degree of overlap with things that have been shown in private demos and
  betas, so I can't expand on that any further, apologies in advance for
 that.





 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: maya graph dependencies

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Just give it some time. Maya's skinning is like bad wine, it grows more
bitter and vinegary by the minute the longer you deal with it :p

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:15 AM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at
wrote:

 Oh well I just play around with mgear and ngskinning and it doesnt feel
 that bad. Maybe cause it is what you are supposed to do. Use plugins and
 try to avoid maya internal functions as often as possible.

Re: Digital Tutors - All tutorials free for 3 days (if I read correctly).

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Given some of them, especially the rigging ones when I last reviewed their
training, if you absorb all of them you have very good chances of devolving
into something that can only live at the bottom of the ocean and feed on
bacteria.

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Better absorb all Softimage tutorials they have :)




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Digital Tutors - All tutorials free for 3 days (if I read correctly).

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Basically they had no effect on you is what you're saying :)

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 9:49 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com
wrote:

 I'm not a fan of their rigging videos either. Was left very underwhelmed
 and uneducated.

 
 Eric Thivierge
 http://www.ethivierge.com




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Digital Tutors - All tutorials free for 3 days (if I read correctly).

[Raffaele Fragapane]

There's actually some pretty decent stuff on DT, I've used them in the past
to catch up to features or as background noise for new apps. Some of the
XSI ones are actually by list fellows, those I'm sure are good.
It's just the run-of-the-mill default dude rigging ones that were fraught
with inaccuracies and bad advice to the point of being counter productive.

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 9:57 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Haha. A few tutorials are really good. The rigging ones i think are very
 basic. Cmivfx are better in terms of quality. Nevertheless, it's a great
 opportunity to reach a few of them that could save you time.

 On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 3:40 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Given some of them, especially the rigging ones when I last reviewed
 their training, if you absorb all of them you have very good chances of
 devolving into something that can only live at the bottom of the ocean and
 feed on bacteria.

 On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Better absorb all Softimage tutorials they have :)




 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Maya freelance list

[Raffaele Fragapane]

On a more serious note, I honestly don't mind it if people bring Houdini,
Maya, ZBush and whatnot into this list. I of course only speak for myself
here, I don't know what the general consensus is in those regards, though
it seems rather friendly when these subjects come up.

I'd rather it stays alive with good company in it as a general CG list than
seeing it wither and die completely because Soft was killed. It'd feel
pretty wasteful and sad if a community that had qualities transcending the
software was to get lost completely.

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote:

 OT Raf? nope.

 I imagine there'll be a slow decline of the population and subject matter
 of this list until it resembles the discussion list of old, mainly useful
 for monkeys, cheese, cheese monkeys and organising drinks so we can mutter
 about the good old days.

 A.

 On 21 January 2015 at 20:00, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 What few flame and inferno suites are left are probably the closest
 thing. Is your friend ready to have stuff snorted off his nipples though?
 That's the real test for a client facing compositor, doing a split the
 difference while he's being snorted off.

 Is this off topic? My apologies Adam, probably not the type of thread you
 intended to start.

 On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:

 Which app do I use to become the expensive high-class hooker.  Asking
 for a friend...


 On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 To be fair, it's not like half of us aren't doing the DCC app
 equivalent of turning tricks on a street corner these days ;)

 On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Asking about Maya Freelancers in a Softimage mailing list knowing how
 much some hate Autodesk...   hmm.





 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Maya freelance list

[Raffaele Fragapane]

To be fair, it's not like half of us aren't doing the DCC app equivalent of
turning tricks on a street corner these days ;)

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Asking about Maya Freelancers in a Softimage mailing list knowing how much
 some hate Autodesk...   hmm.

Re: Maya freelance list

[Raffaele Fragapane]

What few flame and inferno suites are left are probably the closest thing.
Is your friend ready to have stuff snorted off his nipples though? That's
the real test for a client facing compositor, doing a split the difference
while he's being snorted off.

Is this off topic? My apologies Adam, probably not the type of thread you
intended to start.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:

 Which app do I use to become the expensive high-class hooker.  Asking for
 a friend...


 On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 To be fair, it's not like half of us aren't doing the DCC app equivalent
 of turning tricks on a street corner these days ;)

 On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Tenshi S. tenshu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Asking about Maya Freelancers in a Softimage mailing list knowing how
 much some hate Autodesk...   hmm.





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Maya freelance list

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You can't be using Maya and be willing to identify yourself as Maya people
and also be decent at the same time.
You are asking for the impossible, Adam.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 12:51 PM, Adam Seeley adammsee...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 Excuse the blasphemous nature of the post but the company I'm currently
 working with are looking for some Maya freelancers.

 Is there a good place to find decent Maya people?

 Many thanks,

 Adam.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: ICE surface deformer

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Because it's cooler? (pun intended).
With enough cores also reasonably faster if you bake the binding to an ICE
attribute, it's a widely scaling operation you can kernel out per point.

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 2:57 AM, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote:

 You already have a surface deformer, why does it need to be in ICE?

 Matt




 Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 15:36:16 +0200
 From: Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com
 Subject: ICE surface deformer
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com


 Hi guys
 Does anyone know of a surface deformer(same as the out of the box
 surface deformer), like the curve deformer in ICE?
 Hope that sentence made sense :)
 Thanks
 G




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Teaching Unreal vs Unity

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Oh FFS autcorrect
I CAN'T say much, not can say much, though that was deliciously ironic of
the autocorrection given this is the intertubes :p

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 5:47 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 As someone who has little experience and no preference I can say much in
 any authoritative fashion.
 Two things I would consider though that have not been mentioned much:

 Do you have programming in the curriculum, maybe even in other degrees
 that eventually connect with the one you teach in? If so consider the C++
 C# difference G mentioned.

 Do you plan to encourage and offer collateral support for your students
 that decide to go dip in the deep technical end? Same consideration, make
 sure they can be supported by someone with experience.

 Do you have particularly successful or fruitful work placement ties with
 companies or other unis? If you do what do they prefer? Which of the two is
 more marketable for the average profile you have created insofar for your
 students, or the profile you aim to create.

 Ultimately I don't believe the valuable lessons in game design will be so
 tightly coupled with the engine you choose that you will do damage either
 way, much like if you are an extremely good creative or TD you can shine
 even through an app you're not hugely familiar with and pick it up as you
 go. All that said, if in doubt to the point of a coin toss decision then
 look at post-degree consequences of the choice, whichever gives the more
 immediate edge in employment is likely preferable.

 Winning the junior employment race for a lot of people that aren't head
 and shoulders above the average is made of 1% edges.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Teaching Unreal vs Unity

[Raffaele Fragapane]

As someone who has little experience and no preference I can say much in
any authoritative fashion.
Two things I would consider though that have not been mentioned much:

Do you have programming in the curriculum, maybe even in other degrees that
eventually connect with the one you teach in? If so consider the C++ C#
difference G mentioned.

Do you plan to encourage and offer collateral support for your students
that decide to go dip in the deep technical end? Same consideration, make
sure they can be supported by someone with experience.

Do you have particularly successful or fruitful work placement ties with
companies or other unis? If you do what do they prefer? Which of the two is
more marketable for the average profile you have created insofar for your
students, or the profile you aim to create.

Ultimately I don't believe the valuable lessons in game design will be so
tightly coupled with the engine you choose that you will do damage either
way, much like if you are an extremely good creative or TD you can shine
even through an app you're not hugely familiar with and pick it up as you
go. All that said, if in doubt to the point of a coin toss decision then
look at post-degree consequences of the choice, whichever gives the more
immediate edge in employment is likely preferable.

Winning the junior employment race for a lot of people that aren't head and
shoulders above the average is made of 1% edges.

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Be ready to have someone write some help if you ever do, without a decent
system to reduce them to sparse data and to work do the work GPU side 800
shapes move at the speed of a brick chained to a column, especially in Maya
:) XSI 5 however was managing it respectably well already on Pentium III
and 4s back then :)

On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 2:44 AM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 Thanks Raff,

 I have used both techniques but never heard some of those terms ICE
 made doing this work much easier for me.

 I have never ended up with 800 shapes but give me the time and the
 budget and that sounds like a blast :)


 On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 You can blame Bay Raitt for some of the names being thrown around, and
 the LISP community he grew up in :)

 Combination sculpting comes in two flavors, FACS based, with expressions
 tabled out and combinations being largely corrective and flattened out, and
 twitch based, with shapes representing individual muscles as roots,
 combinations of nearby muscles in couples or triplets as first branch, and
 so on to full face compensation, usually you stop at tier three or four,
 which can easily get you hundreds of shapes (Charlotte in Charlotte's web
 was twitch combinations and amounted to 802 shapes, Gollum in return of the
 kind was FACS and I think Bay ended up in the 820 or so range in the end).

 You can use something like stretch mesh (or ideally better) equalisation
 process after that to reduce drift if you're in a hurry with the broad
 strokes.

 Combinatorics are shapes that bridge two other shapes by correcting their
 conflict (additive) rather than by replacing them (you can combine with C =
 abs(A-B) in the former, or suplant with C = abs(A-B) and then subtract C's
 intensity from A and B).

 On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com
 wrote:

 We (Brad did all the ICE magic) worked up some pretty niffy tricks for
 our head tech demo.

 We could pose our head which was a slightly enhanced FR rig export a
 reference head into ZB... bring it back into soft the subtract the the
 deforms of the mesh and reapply only the differences from the corrective
 shape.

 Point drift is caused most of the time by subdividing the model in
 Zbrush. If you do a subdivision in Z all your base point will shift.   In
 our case the mesh was dense enough that was not an issue, we could still
 clearly see the forms without subdividing while in Zbrush. Brad wired up a
 ICE tree for the imported corrective shapes to be triggered by pulling
 different distances from the rig. Of course drift can happen from someone
 moving points they have no business of moving, or even worse they move
 points in the wrong direction for the correction or shape. I always work in
 a stepped process to avoid this for shapes, whether I sent to Zbrush or
 not. I am at first only focused on how the point mass moves first. I try to
 get this done with as few proportional moves as possible. Then I test the
 motion in Soft and on the rig.,  take a look at what it looks like with the
 jaw open etc. Then I slowly massage the shapes into place checking the
 sculpt in action

 I don't remember if the zbrush link busts your rig, in our case the
 workflow was to use separate reference geo.

 It is better if it when done all under one roof but if my point count
 goes high enough  I will jump through a few hoops to get to a better point
 manipulator.

 Raf I have never heard the term combinatorics before, and when I looked
 it up I could not find any references that clearly showed me how it applied
 to shape animation or rigging. Can you point me to a reference that might
 help fill in my knowledge gap  : )

 Also Eric,  I had heard of folks having a different neutral vs skinning
 pose but I have not really seen a good explanation of the idea. I have
 modified a sculpt to be better for rigging, but that shape then becomes my
 base shape. What is the difference?



 On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 If you're doing combinatorics you don't model the shapes in isolation,
 you tweak a base and need to see the result on the combination, which might
 be one to four tiers of combinations away.
 You don't do combination sculpting without the rig because you don't do
 combination sculpting on the final shape half the time if you're sensible
 and can't waste a lot of time in kickbacks.

 Doing shapes in ZBrush is doable, but they all need a lot of work after
 coming back in because by the nature of ZBrush you will have shit drifting
 all over the place. When they will add more than a single morph and a few
 simple vector operations to wire the morphs it will then be the ultimate
 tool for it, right now it's like trying to drive a truck out of a parking
 lot with a small gate. Blindfolded. On iced out ground. With a monkey
 hitting you on the head with a baseball bat

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

If you're doing combinatorics you don't model the shapes in isolation, you
tweak a base and need to see the result on the combination, which might be
one to four tiers of combinations away.
You don't do combination sculpting without the rig because you don't do
combination sculpting on the final shape half the time if you're sensible
and can't waste a lot of time in kickbacks.

Doing shapes in ZBrush is doable, but they all need a lot of work after
coming back in because by the nature of ZBrush you will have shit drifting
all over the place. When they will add more than a single morph and a few
simple vector operations to wire the morphs it will then be the ultimate
tool for it, right now it's like trying to drive a truck out of a parking
lot with a small gate. Blindfolded. On iced out ground. With a monkey
hitting you on the head with a baseball bat every five seconds. Technically
doable, but not worth the bother unless you get to show the mental
breakdowns on TV and cash them in :)

If you're doing cartoony or largely procedurally shaded stuff you can take
a fair amount of drift. if you're doing something that has hundreds of
rigid scales or precisely styled hair bound to the UV space it's an
unmitigated disaster when you don't have something like Soft (or a shitton
of stuff piled on top of Maya) around to do the work.

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 Raff while what you say is true about needing to check the results of your
 sculpts in combination with with other shapes and deformers. There is no
 reason those edits should not be done in the tool-set best suited to sculpt.

 Using something like Zaplink or a few scripts can make the back and forth
 seamless.  ICE made it so much easier to to pose based deformations and
 corrective shapes using Zbrush to edit.

 That being said I still do a great bit of my shape work in soft, unless
 its a very dense mesh, then I whip out the Z

 On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 The problem with ZBrush, or any modelling app that doesn't have your full
 rig in it, is that for things like combination sculpting they are useless,
 because you need to see multiple timelines of the shapes converging as you
 refine them for the result to be any good. It's also a ton easier to get
 combinatorics started in Soft since you can start any shape from any number
 of others with ICE. I so miss that in any other app (that last bit is
 literally the only one where Houdini could compete or even surpass Soft,
 actually, though it's somewhat painful to wrangle the shit together when
 you hit a certain degree of complexity and you end up spending more time
 making an uber rig than you do working the shapes' alignment).

 On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez 
 jordiba...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks for the notes, there has been quite a lot of changes but it is
 true there are a few of your comments still pending, the most pressing to
 me is speed and the viewport needs still lots of love.

 BTW, I was not advocating to use Houdini for modelling though, rather
 use Zbrush to be honest and now that Zbrush is getting closer to a full set
 of traditional modelling tools it is pretty obvious it is the route to go.

 My feeling is that character work is certainly more painful but at least
 you get some serious gains and unfortunately there are no options so we are
 in a transition moment.

 So far they are listening and moving forward so I will stick to Houdini
 for the time being and keep an eye on others.

 :-)

 jb


 On 16 Jan 2015, at 21:28, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 A lot of quality rigging, despite piles of papers trying to sell the
 public on the contrary, is still manually tweaked. Taking things out of the
 app where you have the full rig makes authoring a major pain. The most
 basic example is shapes, doing shapes work in XSI for something like a
 combination sculpting setup was as easy as it got, especially after ICE.
 The way data is presented and accessible, the speed on large meshes, the
 modelling toolkit, it all lent itself to that kind of work in a perfect
 storm scenario.
 Doing the same in Maya, comparatively, is beyond painful and requires a
 pretty big staging effort to separate work and write accessory tools, in
 Houdini you don't even have a particularly intuitive modelling toolkit, and
 the handling of large meshes was pretty meh with it (at least up to 12, it
 seems to be getting better and promising to be getting better again).

 The toolkit in general is pretty hard to impossible to give to a
 modeller with little inclination to learn something like Houdini, while
 with both Maya and Soft that's not a big challenge.

 I haven't tried the muscle system in a while, so my comment might be
 dated to the point of not being valid, but the last time I did it was a bit
 of a joke. No arbitrary topology for the deformers unless you

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

You can blame Bay Raitt for some of the names being thrown around, and the
LISP community he grew up in :)

Combination sculpting comes in two flavors, FACS based, with expressions
tabled out and combinations being largely corrective and flattened out, and
twitch based, with shapes representing individual muscles as roots,
combinations of nearby muscles in couples or triplets as first branch, and
so on to full face compensation, usually you stop at tier three or four,
which can easily get you hundreds of shapes (Charlotte in Charlotte's web
was twitch combinations and amounted to 802 shapes, Gollum in return of the
kind was FACS and I think Bay ended up in the 820 or so range in the end).

You can use something like stretch mesh (or ideally better) equalisation
process after that to reduce drift if you're in a hurry with the broad
strokes.

Combinatorics are shapes that bridge two other shapes by correcting their
conflict (additive) rather than by replacing them (you can combine with C =
abs(A-B) in the former, or suplant with C = abs(A-B) and then subtract C's
intensity from A and B).

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com wrote:

 We (Brad did all the ICE magic) worked up some pretty niffy tricks for our
 head tech demo.

 We could pose our head which was a slightly enhanced FR rig export a
 reference head into ZB... bring it back into soft the subtract the the
 deforms of the mesh and reapply only the differences from the corrective
 shape.

 Point drift is caused most of the time by subdividing the model in Zbrush.
 If you do a subdivision in Z all your base point will shift.   In our case
 the mesh was dense enough that was not an issue, we could still clearly see
 the forms without subdividing while in Zbrush. Brad wired up a ICE tree for
 the imported corrective shapes to be triggered by pulling different
 distances from the rig. Of course drift can happen from someone moving
 points they have no business of moving, or even worse they move points in
 the wrong direction for the correction or shape. I always work in a stepped
 process to avoid this for shapes, whether I sent to Zbrush or not. I am at
 first only focused on how the point mass moves first. I try to get this
 done with as few proportional moves as possible. Then I test the motion in
 Soft and on the rig.,  take a look at what it looks like with the jaw open
 etc. Then I slowly massage the shapes into place checking the sculpt in
 action

 I don't remember if the zbrush link busts your rig, in our case the
 workflow was to use separate reference geo.

 It is better if it when done all under one roof but if my point count goes
 high enough  I will jump through a few hoops to get to a better point
 manipulator.

 Raf I have never heard the term combinatorics before, and when I looked it
 up I could not find any references that clearly showed me how it applied
 to shape animation or rigging. Can you point me to a reference that might
 help fill in my knowledge gap  : )

 Also Eric,  I had heard of folks having a different neutral vs skinning
 pose but I have not really seen a good explanation of the idea. I have
 modified a sculpt to be better for rigging, but that shape then becomes my
 base shape. What is the difference?



 On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 If you're doing combinatorics you don't model the shapes in isolation,
 you tweak a base and need to see the result on the combination, which might
 be one to four tiers of combinations away.
 You don't do combination sculpting without the rig because you don't do
 combination sculpting on the final shape half the time if you're sensible
 and can't waste a lot of time in kickbacks.

 Doing shapes in ZBrush is doable, but they all need a lot of work after
 coming back in because by the nature of ZBrush you will have shit drifting
 all over the place. When they will add more than a single morph and a few
 simple vector operations to wire the morphs it will then be the ultimate
 tool for it, right now it's like trying to drive a truck out of a parking
 lot with a small gate. Blindfolded. On iced out ground. With a monkey
 hitting you on the head with a baseball bat every five seconds. Technically
 doable, but not worth the bother unless you get to show the mental
 breakdowns on TV and cash them in :)

 If you're doing cartoony or largely procedurally shaded stuff you can
 take a fair amount of drift. if you're doing something that has hundreds of
 rigid scales or precisely styled hair bound to the UV space it's an
 unmitigated disaster when you don't have something like Soft (or a shitton
 of stuff piled on top of Maya) around to do the work.

 On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Greg Punchatz g...@janimation.com
 wrote:

 Raff while what you say is true about needing to check the results of
 your sculpts in combination with with other shapes and deformers. There is
 no reason those edits should

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's only true for some definitions of rigging.
If you need proceduralism of course it does spectacularly well, and assets
are simply best of breed in the industry and have been for years, end of
story.
For the hand-crafted complex character rig and tuned deformation kind of
job though, no, it's not nicer than Soft, and I'd be hard pressed to make
an argument for it over Maya (which I consider pretty bottom barreling
already without a ton of custom work).

Some of the upgrades in H14 and some of the future roadmap do bode well for
that though.

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote:

  Well I say nicer, because there are allot of toys to play with.
 I think rigging is the part where you need a non destructive procedural
 work flow the most.
 In Maya it feels like you have to make damn sure you are done with step A
 before moving onto step B.
 Houdini is flexible to the point where you become reckless with your work
 flow :)
 Bit more complex when you get started, but worth it.
 The auto rig at the very least doesn't break like the soft one used to in
 2011 :)
 G


 On 16/01/2015 14:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote:

 Riggin nicer then Soft?
 Will have to check it out then.. In maya rigging and enveloping is huge
 crap and biggest reason that I don't wanna ago back int othat hell at first
 place.

 On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote:

 After trying to learn maya for about 6 months, learning houdini is a
 breath of fresh air!!
 It is not softimage, but I think its the only thing that will come close
 to the flexibility and power of soft for small studios and freelancers.
 Once you get into it, It is even more power.
 I tried learning it about 2 years ago, and gave up because I thought my
 time would be better spent getting better in soft (the future was still
 bright back then)
 Back then it seemed complicated, but after dealing with maya, it feels
 sooo much friendlier.
 The way I see it, you get the operator stack, and ice tree, all in one
 place, the network view
 So its one thing to learn.
 In Maya I feel like I have to learn new software every time I do
 something else.
 Rigging I found nicer than soft, and the animation editor in houdini
 feels like a polished version of the soft one.
 Houdini engine is still blowing my mind.. like it doesn't stop!!
 At $300 you cannot ignore this as a piece of your pipeline!
 I'll probably do allot of work in maya because I need to fit into teams
 of Mayans, but with the houdini engine, I can do the work in the software
 best suited for it, without forcing the rest of the team to conform.
 G




 On 16/01/2015 12:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote:

 modeling and character riga nd animation wise it is I assume sitill nt
 as suser friendly as SI right?
 how us ievrall generalist and smalls tudio experience?
 SI is more or less out of the box great steramlined solution..







-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

A lot of quality rigging, despite piles of papers trying to sell the public
on the contrary, is still manually tweaked. Taking things out of the app
where you have the full rig makes authoring a major pain. The most basic
example is shapes, doing shapes work in XSI for something like a
combination sculpting setup was as easy as it got, especially after ICE.
The way data is presented and accessible, the speed on large meshes, the
modelling toolkit, it all lent itself to that kind of work in a perfect
storm scenario.
Doing the same in Maya, comparatively, is beyond painful and requires a
pretty big staging effort to separate work and write accessory tools, in
Houdini you don't even have a particularly intuitive modelling toolkit, and
the handling of large meshes was pretty meh with it (at least up to 12, it
seems to be getting better and promising to be getting better again).

The toolkit in general is pretty hard to impossible to give to a modeller
with little inclination to learn something like Houdini, while with both
Maya and Soft that's not a big challenge.

I haven't tried the muscle system in a while, so my comment might be dated
to the point of not being valid, but the last time I did it was a bit of a
joke. No arbitrary topology for the deformers unless you cloth collided
(and the cloth solver was anything but acceptable), only some weak superset
of metaballs, rather slow, but at least it was relatively stable, and
overall clunky and requiring the lot a lot of micromanagement and a lot of
SOPs that often refused to play nicely with the rest of the app.
Mind, I haven't found a single commercial muscle system I would use if they
paid me for it, which is pretty embarrassing given when we needed one for
WWD we got a rather intuitive one done in just a few weeks that worked for
over 99% of the show meshes without manual intervention of any sort on the
sim, and literally only a dozen mesh fixes across over 800 shots.

On top of all that, and again this is pre-14, most pre-13, it's slow. Mind
boggingly slow to articulate a decent animation rig. I suspect this last
point has been, or is about to be, superseded though since the viewport has
been getting some love.

The main issue though remains that preparing an asset in Houdini remains a
long and involved process which very few people from other departments,
some times nobody, can be recruited into, it's born, lives and dies in the
hands of TDs.

I've always had a soft spot for Houdini, and I'd give my money to SideFX
rather than many other companies any day of the year, but as a company
their commitment to character work of artistic or hybrid nature has always
been patchy (and I don't necessarily blame them for it) and subpar.
They have a lot of work to make up for it, but they seem to be slowly doing
it while making sure they don't lose their core business with FX and
end-to-end clients.

I will certainly be looking at H14 as soon as some space for it in the
stash of stuff I need and want to do before clears up :)


On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez jordiba...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 May I ask you to elaborate the “complex character rigging and tuned
 deformation”, I may be missing something.

 To start with you have muscles in Houdini which you don’t, let alone FEM
 simulations and a universal physics engine to cope with pretty
 sophisticated things…

 Certainly it is easier in Softimage and more artist friendly to setup but
 I see the rigging side as one very strong point.

 If you are talking about screen space corrections, blend shapes and
 advanced contact collision its certainly doable with  the toolset.

 :-|

 thx
 jb


 On 16 Jan 2015, at 16:59, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 It's only true for some definitions of rigging.
 If you need proceduralism of course it does spectacularly well, and assets
 are simply best of breed in the industry and have been for years, end of
 story.
 For the hand-crafted complex character rig and tuned deformation kind of
 job though, no, it's not nicer than Soft, and I'd be hard pressed to make
 an argument for it over Maya (which I consider pretty bottom barreling
 already without a ton of custom work).

 Some of the upgrades in H14 and some of the future roadmap do bode well
 for that though.

 On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote:

  Well I say nicer, because there are allot of toys to play with.
 I think rigging is the part where you need a non destructive procedural
 work flow the most.
 In Maya it feels like you have to make damn sure you are done with step A
 before moving onto step B.
 Houdini is flexible to the point where you become reckless with your work
 flow :)
 Bit more complex when you get started, but worth it.
 The auto rig at the very least doesn't break like the soft one used to in
 2011 :)
 G


 On 16/01/2015 14:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote:

 Riggin nicer then Soft?
 Will have to check it out then.. In maya rigging

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

The problem with ZBrush, or any modelling app that doesn't have your full
rig in it, is that for things like combination sculpting they are useless,
because you need to see multiple timelines of the shapes converging as you
refine them for the result to be any good. It's also a ton easier to get
combinatorics started in Soft since you can start any shape from any number
of others with ICE. I so miss that in any other app (that last bit is
literally the only one where Houdini could compete or even surpass Soft,
actually, though it's somewhat painful to wrangle the shit together when
you hit a certain degree of complexity and you end up spending more time
making an uber rig than you do working the shapes' alignment).

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez 
jordiba...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks for the notes, there has been quite a lot of changes but it is true
 there are a few of your comments still pending, the most pressing to me is
 speed and the viewport needs still lots of love.

 BTW, I was not advocating to use Houdini for modelling though, rather use
 Zbrush to be honest and now that Zbrush is getting closer to a full set of
 traditional modelling tools it is pretty obvious it is the route to go.

 My feeling is that character work is certainly more painful but at least
 you get some serious gains and unfortunately there are no options so we are
 in a transition moment.

 So far they are listening and moving forward so I will stick to Houdini
 for the time being and keep an eye on others.

 :-)

 jb


 On 16 Jan 2015, at 21:28, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 A lot of quality rigging, despite piles of papers trying to sell the
 public on the contrary, is still manually tweaked. Taking things out of the
 app where you have the full rig makes authoring a major pain. The most
 basic example is shapes, doing shapes work in XSI for something like a
 combination sculpting setup was as easy as it got, especially after ICE.
 The way data is presented and accessible, the speed on large meshes, the
 modelling toolkit, it all lent itself to that kind of work in a perfect
 storm scenario.
 Doing the same in Maya, comparatively, is beyond painful and requires a
 pretty big staging effort to separate work and write accessory tools, in
 Houdini you don't even have a particularly intuitive modelling toolkit, and
 the handling of large meshes was pretty meh with it (at least up to 12, it
 seems to be getting better and promising to be getting better again).

 The toolkit in general is pretty hard to impossible to give to a modeller
 with little inclination to learn something like Houdini, while with both
 Maya and Soft that's not a big challenge.

 I haven't tried the muscle system in a while, so my comment might be dated
 to the point of not being valid, but the last time I did it was a bit of a
 joke. No arbitrary topology for the deformers unless you cloth collided
 (and the cloth solver was anything but acceptable), only some weak superset
 of metaballs, rather slow, but at least it was relatively stable, and
 overall clunky and requiring the lot a lot of micromanagement and a lot of
 SOPs that often refused to play nicely with the rest of the app.
 Mind, I haven't found a single commercial muscle system I would use if
 they paid me for it, which is pretty embarrassing given when we needed one
 for WWD we got a rather intuitive one done in just a few weeks that worked
 for over 99% of the show meshes without manual intervention of any sort on
 the sim, and literally only a dozen mesh fixes across over 800 shots.

 On top of all that, and again this is pre-14, most pre-13, it's slow. Mind
 boggingly slow to articulate a decent animation rig. I suspect this last
 point has been, or is about to be, superseded though since the viewport has
 been getting some love.

 The main issue though remains that preparing an asset in Houdini remains a
 long and involved process which very few people from other departments,
 some times nobody, can be recruited into, it's born, lives and dies in the
 hands of TDs.

 I've always had a soft spot for Houdini, and I'd give my money to SideFX
 rather than many other companies any day of the year, but as a company
 their commitment to character work of artistic or hybrid nature has always
 been patchy (and I don't necessarily blame them for it) and subpar.
 They have a lot of work to make up for it, but they seem to be slowly
 doing it while making sure they don't lose their core business with FX and
 end-to-end clients.

 I will certainly be looking at H14 as soon as some space for it in the
 stash of stuff I need and want to do before clears up :)


 On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez 
 jordiba...@gmail.com wrote:

 May I ask you to elaborate the “complex character rigging and tuned
 deformation”, I may be missing something.

 To start with you have muscles in Houdini which you don’t, let alone FEM
 simulations

Re: OT : Release a free uitility Nb Code Lines

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Many lines of compact and well behaved software are still more productivity
than few lines of compact and well behaved software usually :)
That said, I know of nowhere left that measures things in plain line count,
usually it's something you do for your own edification/curiosity, not an
actual functional measure of anything.

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 3:09 PM, philipp seis dpi...@gmail.com wrote:

 I always thought it's better for a programmer to require less lines of
 code... !?
 Are there programmers who are paid per line ?

 Nonetheless, congrats to your development :)

 2015-01-15 12:57 GMT+01:00 Alok Gandhi alok.gandhi2...@gmail.com:

 I bet its not as sophosticated as git-loc but it sufficed my needs.

 Maybe later I will more features.

 Also this works on any root folder on the local drive and you have
 complete control over the file extensions. You can add, edit or remove file
 extensions on the fly.

 Sent from my iPhone

 On 15-Jan-2015, at 5:16 pm, Cesar Saez cesa...@gmail.com wrote:

 It looks nice, thanks!
 I've been using git-loc http://brokestream.com/git-loc.html for a
 while (love the svg output) but I will give a chance to yours ASAP :)

 Cheers!

 On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Alok Gandhi alok.gandhi2...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Hi All,

 I have released a new utility app Nb Code Lines -  for programmers to
 measure their productivity in terms of number of code lines written.

 *http://bit.ly/1CpyDAV http://bit.ly/1CpyDAV*

 Hope you guys will find it useful.

 Please feel free to contact me in case of bugs or to add new features.

 Enjoy !

 Alok.


 --






-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: H14 is out !

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Maya has recently got pretty close to catching up to XSI 5 and in less than
another five or six years Bifrost should be on par with Moondust, and now
Houdini has almost caught up to XSI of Lagoa times.
By this pace in less than 74 years for Maya, and only a dozen or so for
Houdini, we'll be where we would have been next year had Soft not been
killed!

Totally looking forward to 2026 and 2089!

The snow is pretty cool though :)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:11 AM, Sven Constable sixsi_l...@imagefront.de
wrote:

 Snow and sand reminds me of lagoa in Softimage on steroids. Go Houdini!

Re: OT: Visiting London in January, anybody wanna meet for beers?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

The first person announcing they are off to have a prostate exam and asking
if anyone wants to tag along to have theirs checked as well wins the thread.

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Wish I could join you Helge, but I won't be in London no more.

 Just a reminder I'm hoping to meet whomever can make it tonight around
 6.45pm front of white horse outside drinking area 16 Newburgh Street,
 Soho, London W1F 7RY, United Kingdom, as Rob Chapman suggested.

 See you all later! :)

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2015, 1:24 PM Helge Mathee helge.mat...@gmx.net wrote:

  as it turns out it is going to be the 14th. Anyone wanting to join
 in just email me off list.


 -H


 On 08.01.2015 12:56, Helge Mathee wrote:

 Ok - for my own personal joy I'll suggest thursday 15th at whitehorse.
 feel free to email me off-list

 helge.mat...@fabricengine.com

 On 07.01.2015 13:19, Alan Fregtman wrote:

 Sounds good, guys! :) See you Friday.

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2015, 12:05 PM Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 wrote:

 I’m up for Friday, and I might be able to bring a ‘special guest’

 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Jordi Bares
 Dominguez
 Sent: 07 January 2015 11:19
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: OT: Visiting London in January, anybody wanna meet for
 beers?

 Exactly, let’s meet!

 On 7 Jan 2015, at 09:24, Rob Chapman tekano@gmail.commailto:
 tekano@gmail.com wrote:

 ok thanks for that Leendert, but back on topic.. seems there are a few
 softies who saw this and feel like going but are not as vocal, so can we
 get some consensus on date/time/place ?  I would tentatively like to pencil
 this Friday 6.45pm front of white horse outside drinking area 16 Newburgh
 Street, Soho, London W1F 7RY, United Kingdom


 cheers!

 Rob-c

 On 6 January 2015 at 20:26, Simon Reeves si...@simonreeves.commailto:
 si...@simonreeves.com wrote:
 I'll be up for a drink sometime, shaston is quite small? What kind of 3d
 artist drinks inside in soho? :)


 On Tuesday, 6 January 2015, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nl
 mailto:hirazib...@live.nl wrote:
 And that should have read store', not story obviously. :blush:

 --

 Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
 Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.comhttp://si-community.com/
 

 --


 Simon Reeves
 London, UK
 si...@simonreeves.commailto:si...@simonreeves.com
 www.simonreeves.comhttp://www.simonreeves.com/
 www.analogstudio.co.ukhttp://www.analogstudio.co.uk/








-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: semi OT : running SI on a Macbook Pro

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Since we have a few adventurous Xplatforming Mac lovers around, How is the
Linux experience these days on an MBP? I read very conflicting opinions
ranging from practically native to it burnt my laptop and killed all my
family pets.

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 2:03 AM, Graham D. Clark mailgrahamdcl...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:
  ... I've seen both 1600x900 and 1920x1080 on (3k) retina displays, and
  although they aren't as extra crisp as retina, they are hardly blurry or
  distiguishable from displays that are natively in these rez (or hardly an
  issue)

 exactly, it's hardly an issue, unless you have issues
 :)
 --
 Graham D Clark, VP/Head of Stereography, Stereo D, Deluxe
 phone: why-I-stereo
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamclark




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: semi OT : running SI on a Macbook Pro

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I'm freezing my nipples off my tits here, I need my socks on!
But more seriously, does everything work or is it going to run
thermonuclear hot and render stuff at random sizes like most of Luc-Eric's
boxes seem to do? :)

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Angus Davidson angus.david...@wits.ac.za
wrote:

  Linux mint on a MBP will blow your socks off ;)


  --
 *From:* Raffaele Fragapane [raffsxsil...@googlemail.com]
 *Sent:* 02 January 2015 10:20 AM
 *To:* Graham D. Clark; softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: semi OT : running SI on a Macbook Pro

   Since we have a few adventurous Xplatforming Mac lovers around, How is
 the Linux experience these days on an MBP? I read very conflicting opinions
 ranging from practically native to it burnt my laptop and killed all my
 family pets.

 On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 2:03 AM, Graham D. Clark 
 mailgrahamdcl...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote:
  ... I've seen both 1600x900 and 1920x1080 on (3k) retina displays, and
  although they aren't as extra crisp as retina, they are hardly blurry or
  distiguishable from displays that are natively in these rez (or hardly
 an
  issue)

 exactly, it's hardly an issue, unless you have issues
 :)
  --
 Graham D Clark, VP/Head of Stereography, Stereo D, Deluxe
 phone: why-I-stereo
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamclark




 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!

  This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. 
 If you have received this communication in error, please notify us 
 immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate 
 this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised 
 signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the 
 University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message 
 may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal 
 views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and 
 opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements 
 between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless 
 the University agrees in writing to the contrary.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Splitting the outlet might or might not work out for you.
While it's touted as a feature a large majority of high output PSUs are
multirail because it's generally cheap to provide multiple stable lines
than one large pipe distributed arbitrarily over N cables.

What that boils down to is that if you have an 800W CPU, but it's a
multirail with the 6pin on a 120W necked line (hard coupled), and you fork
it to two videocards for a 200W pull, you are going at the very least to
run a very hot PSU, and at the worst to set it on fire :p

And if you think Dell or HP use premium components, especially for the
PSUs, think again, more often than not even their workstation grade
components have been, at one point or another, extremely subpar.

You can always convert another rail if you have a multi rail. 6pins aren't
anything magic, they still run two or three sublines like anything else and
a molex on a spare rail should be convertible to 6pin. If you have a
quality single rail PSU, you should be able to safely split.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

  It´s good to write things like this, I guess.

 A minute later I found the HP part number:

 Hewlett Packard 6PIN TO DUAL-6PIN GRAPHICS ADAPTER
 F5J05AA

 This let´s you split a 6pin connection to 2x6pin.

 --

 Similar adapters are available from 3rd party vendors.

 I can´t tell how well this would work when using hot nVidia 7xx range
 cards
 but the gt 970 cards are spec´d for needing roughly 150W, drawing around
 180W in
 actual test scenarios.

 --

 I´d guess that would allow a stable 2xGPU system (using a HP 1100+W PSU)
 but for a 3-4xGPU system, I´d actually revert my suggestion and go
 home/custom built.

 Cheers,

 tim




 Am 30.12.2014 um 12:04 schrieb Tim Leydecker:

 I was suggesting to also look into refurbished HP Z800/Z820/Z840
 workstations
 as a basis for building a multi-GPU plattform.

 There is a grain of salt.

 Most if not all graphics cards come expecting an additional 2x6pin power
 supply,
 e.g. 75W from the PCIe slot, plus 75W from each 6pin connection, there are
 Quadro cards that are spec´ed for 150W power consumption but most
 gaming cards will excess that 150 W drain limit.

 You´d need at least 4 6pin connections for 2 gaming cards.

 The HP Z8++ series may present problems because of the way the PSU provides
 these 6 pin connections in a vendor specific cable kit.

 There are several cable kits available but I haven´t found a 4x6pin kit
 sofar.
 This could be a dissapointment for anyone looking into get such a
 plattform.

 Of course, there is a chance I missed something from the datasheets and
 spare parts
 listings, as well as a chance the HPZ840 doesn´t have such a limitation.

 Worth mentioning anyway.

 Cheers,

 tim
 Am 12.12.2014 um 12:14 schrieb Angus Davidson:

 Worthwhile noting that Octane works with the GTX 9XX cards very well. It
 also has a really good Network GPU support. Which means you dont need to
 cram 4 cards into one machine. If you dont know what you are doing the
 machine can go *Poof* very easily.




  --
 *From:* Tim Leydecker [bauero...@gmx.de]
 *Sent:* 12 December 2014 12:42 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

  Hi,


 I would also like to recommend a nvidia gtx 9xx card, the available cards
 (970980) have a lower power consumption compared to a 7xx series card.

 Aside from that, I would like to point out nvidia CUDA support, which might
 help in a couple of programs, be it redshift or 3d coat or the latest
 nvidia games
 related tools (fluids, cloth, physics, etc for Maya).

 If you have to invest now, e.g. immediately, I´d suggest a 970 4GB card and
 downloading a redshift demo to see if it would benefit your workflow.

 If you can wait a bit longer, I´d suggest waiting for a successor to the
 780ti or
 Titan (Black) nvidia cards, expected early next year, mostly because of the
 more RAM expected to come with these cards, which would give you more
 headroom for heavy scene handling (e.g. shitloads geometry and raytracing).

 There is a lot of new stuff coming early next year, including Houdini and
 Nuke
 versions more accessible due to licensing changes/options.

 In general, I would split my money between system RAM, ssd and graphics
 unit,
 expecting to work happy with a 128-256GB system OS partition, 64GB ish RAM,
 and a gt(x) 9xx ish card with at least 4GB VRAM (6-8GB prefered).

 Making sure that your system has a 800+ Watts PSU will help stability.

 From there, finding redshift attractive, you could always add another
 card to
 your system, devoting it to getting more out of a single render license or
 even
 go fully committed and swap your mainboard to a 4x16PCIe version, adding
 even more cards.

 This implies a tower workstation case and enjoying building your hardware.

 Alternatively, I can recommend looking into refurbished HP Z800/820 or
 Dell T7500/7600
 workstations 

Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

800W PSU not CPU, though a CPU with an 800W TDP would be interesting to
cool :p

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:30 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Splitting the outlet might or might not work out for you.
 While it's touted as a feature a large majority of high output PSUs are
 multirail because it's generally cheap to provide multiple stable lines
 than one large pipe distributed arbitrarily over N cables.

 What that boils down to is that if you have an 800W CPU, but it's a
 multirail with the 6pin on a 120W necked line (hard coupled), and you fork
 it to two videocards for a 200W pull, you are going at the very least to
 run a very hot PSU, and at the worst to set it on fire :p

 And if you think Dell or HP use premium components, especially for the
 PSUs, think again, more often than not even their workstation grade
 components have been, at one point or another, extremely subpar.

 You can always convert another rail if you have a multi rail. 6pins aren't
 anything magic, they still run two or three sublines like anything else and
 a molex on a spare rail should be convertible to 6pin. If you have a
 quality single rail PSU, you should be able to safely split.

 On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

  It´s good to write things like this, I guess.

 A minute later I found the HP part number:

 Hewlett Packard 6PIN TO DUAL-6PIN GRAPHICS ADAPTER
 F5J05AA

 This let´s you split a 6pin connection to 2x6pin.

 --

 Similar adapters are available from 3rd party vendors.

 I can´t tell how well this would work when using hot nVidia 7xx range
 cards
 but the gt 970 cards are spec´d for needing roughly 150W, drawing around
 180W in
 actual test scenarios.

 --

 I´d guess that would allow a stable 2xGPU system (using a HP 1100+W PSU)
 but for a 3-4xGPU system, I´d actually revert my suggestion and go
 home/custom built.

 Cheers,

 tim




 Am 30.12.2014 um 12:04 schrieb Tim Leydecker:

 I was suggesting to also look into refurbished HP Z800/Z820/Z840
 workstations
 as a basis for building a multi-GPU plattform.

 There is a grain of salt.

 Most if not all graphics cards come expecting an additional 2x6pin power
 supply,
 e.g. 75W from the PCIe slot, plus 75W from each 6pin connection, there are
 Quadro cards that are spec´ed for 150W power consumption but most
 gaming cards will excess that 150 W drain limit.

 You´d need at least 4 6pin connections for 2 gaming cards.

 The HP Z8++ series may present problems because of the way the PSU
 provides
 these 6 pin connections in a vendor specific cable kit.

 There are several cable kits available but I haven´t found a 4x6pin kit
 sofar.
 This could be a dissapointment for anyone looking into get such a
 plattform.

 Of course, there is a chance I missed something from the datasheets and
 spare parts
 listings, as well as a chance the HPZ840 doesn´t have such a limitation.

 Worth mentioning anyway.

 Cheers,

 tim
 Am 12.12.2014 um 12:14 schrieb Angus Davidson:

 Worthwhile noting that Octane works with the GTX 9XX cards very well. It
 also has a really good Network GPU support. Which means you dont need to
 cram 4 cards into one machine. If you dont know what you are doing the
 machine can go *Poof* very easily.




  --
 *From:* Tim Leydecker [bauero...@gmx.de]
 *Sent:* 12 December 2014 12:42 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

  Hi,


 I would also like to recommend a nvidia gtx 9xx card, the available cards
 (970980) have a lower power consumption compared to a 7xx series card.

 Aside from that, I would like to point out nvidia CUDA support, which
 might
 help in a couple of programs, be it redshift or 3d coat or the latest
 nvidia games
 related tools (fluids, cloth, physics, etc for Maya).

 If you have to invest now, e.g. immediately, I´d suggest a 970 4GB card
 and
 downloading a redshift demo to see if it would benefit your workflow.

 If you can wait a bit longer, I´d suggest waiting for a successor to the
 780ti or
 Titan (Black) nvidia cards, expected early next year, mostly because of
 the
 more RAM expected to come with these cards, which would give you more
 headroom for heavy scene handling (e.g. shitloads geometry and
 raytracing).

 There is a lot of new stuff coming early next year, including Houdini and
 Nuke
 versions more accessible due to licensing changes/options.

 In general, I would split my money between system RAM, ssd and graphics
 unit,
 expecting to work happy with a 128-256GB system OS partition, 64GB ish
 RAM,
 and a gt(x) 9xx ish card with at least 4GB VRAM (6-8GB prefered).

 Making sure that your system has a 800+ Watts PSU will help stability.

 From there, finding redshift attractive, you could always add another
 card to
 your system, devoting it to getting more out of a single render license
 or even
 go fully committed and swap your mainboard to a 4x16PCIe version, adding
 even

Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Damn premature sends! If you go molex to 6pin make sure it's with a dual
molex adapter, while good PSUs can deliver a lot more on them, standard
molex spec is 40W, while 6pin is 75W.

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 800W PSU not CPU, though a CPU with an 800W TDP would be interesting to
 cool :p

 On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:30 AM, Raffaele Fragapane 
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Splitting the outlet might or might not work out for you.
 While it's touted as a feature a large majority of high output PSUs are
 multirail because it's generally cheap to provide multiple stable lines
 than one large pipe distributed arbitrarily over N cables.

 What that boils down to is that if you have an 800W CPU, but it's a
 multirail with the 6pin on a 120W necked line (hard coupled), and you fork
 it to two videocards for a 200W pull, you are going at the very least to
 run a very hot PSU, and at the worst to set it on fire :p

 And if you think Dell or HP use premium components, especially for the
 PSUs, think again, more often than not even their workstation grade
 components have been, at one point or another, extremely subpar.

 You can always convert another rail if you have a multi rail. 6pins
 aren't anything magic, they still run two or three sublines like anything
 else and a molex on a spare rail should be convertible to 6pin. If you have
 a quality single rail PSU, you should be able to safely split.

 On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

  It´s good to write things like this, I guess.

 A minute later I found the HP part number:

 Hewlett Packard 6PIN TO DUAL-6PIN GRAPHICS ADAPTER
 F5J05AA

 This let´s you split a 6pin connection to 2x6pin.

 --

 Similar adapters are available from 3rd party vendors.

 I can´t tell how well this would work when using hot nVidia 7xx range
 cards
 but the gt 970 cards are spec´d for needing roughly 150W, drawing around
 180W in
 actual test scenarios.

 --

 I´d guess that would allow a stable 2xGPU system (using a HP 1100+W PSU)
 but for a 3-4xGPU system, I´d actually revert my suggestion and go
 home/custom built.

 Cheers,

 tim




 Am 30.12.2014 um 12:04 schrieb Tim Leydecker:

 I was suggesting to also look into refurbished HP Z800/Z820/Z840
 workstations
 as a basis for building a multi-GPU plattform.

 There is a grain of salt.

 Most if not all graphics cards come expecting an additional 2x6pin power
 supply,
 e.g. 75W from the PCIe slot, plus 75W from each 6pin connection, there
 are
 Quadro cards that are spec´ed for 150W power consumption but most
 gaming cards will excess that 150 W drain limit.

 You´d need at least 4 6pin connections for 2 gaming cards.

 The HP Z8++ series may present problems because of the way the PSU
 provides
 these 6 pin connections in a vendor specific cable kit.

 There are several cable kits available but I haven´t found a 4x6pin kit
 sofar.
 This could be a dissapointment for anyone looking into get such a
 plattform.

 Of course, there is a chance I missed something from the datasheets and
 spare parts
 listings, as well as a chance the HPZ840 doesn´t have such a limitation.

 Worth mentioning anyway.

 Cheers,

 tim
 Am 12.12.2014 um 12:14 schrieb Angus Davidson:

 Worthwhile noting that Octane works with the GTX 9XX cards very well. It
 also has a really good Network GPU support. Which means you dont need to
 cram 4 cards into one machine. If you dont know what you are doing the
 machine can go *Poof* very easily.




  --
 *From:* Tim Leydecker [bauero...@gmx.de]
 *Sent:* 12 December 2014 12:42 PM
 *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 *Subject:* Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

  Hi,


 I would also like to recommend a nvidia gtx 9xx card, the available cards
 (970980) have a lower power consumption compared to a 7xx series card.

 Aside from that, I would like to point out nvidia CUDA support, which
 might
 help in a couple of programs, be it redshift or 3d coat or the latest
 nvidia games
 related tools (fluids, cloth, physics, etc for Maya).

 If you have to invest now, e.g. immediately, I´d suggest a 970 4GB card
 and
 downloading a redshift demo to see if it would benefit your workflow.

 If you can wait a bit longer, I´d suggest waiting for a successor to the
 780ti or
 Titan (Black) nvidia cards, expected early next year, mostly because of
 the
 more RAM expected to come with these cards, which would give you more
 headroom for heavy scene handling (e.g. shitloads geometry and
 raytracing).

 There is a lot of new stuff coming early next year, including Houdini
 and Nuke
 versions more accessible due to licensing changes/options.

 In general, I would split my money between system RAM, ssd and graphics
 unit,
 expecting to work happy with a 128-256GB system OS partition, 64GB ish
 RAM,
 and a gt(x) 9xx ish card with at least 4GB VRAM (6-8GB prefered).

 Making sure that your system has

Re: Lets Hope Autodesk Buys the Foundry!

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's owned by an investment group. They sell in a particular hurry
ESPECIALLY when something is going well. You sell at peak value shortly
after a round of re-valuing purchases and hype, when cash value is high for
returns, and earnings prospects are high to entice buyers.

As for who'll be buying, I'd be surprised if it was AD, but can't rule it
out, a media group or an unexpected games-side player or something like
that seems more likely though.

Or maybe DS will decide to piss in AD's cornflakes buying it, but I doubt
they are willing to shell out 200-250M pounds for such an unfamiliar
patents package and software they have no cross-sales potential or sales
network to merge and reduce in.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 8:31 PM, David Saber davidsa...@sfr.fr wrote:

 Why is it sold? I thought Modo was going well... ?



-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It's worth noting, since people seem to not be fully aware of it, that
temperature on modern nVIDIA cards (particularly Kepler and on, but to an
extent even Fermi) is NOT to be considered the way you are used to.

While for marketing reasons nVIDIA suggests it's a dynamic overclocking of
sorts (GPU boost), modern cards are designed to operate at peak and
constantly throttle down from there (so in reality it operates like a
safety measure does on CPUs).

What that means is that, in example, a Titan will actually be pretty much
at 80+ Celsius all the time try to hit max clock (some will hit 1k and
above, some 960). That isn't a bad thing, it's designed to operate at that
temperature.
What the hardware does is vary several parameters, chiefly the clock, until
the temperature reaches a cap, and then constantly vary those parameters to
keep it there or just under.

While in the past constant throttling could be bad for performance, and
still is for CPUs on most tasks, Kepler and after GPUs are designed around
it.
So if you buy a 9xx, or a top end 7xx that's not a Maxwell preliminary (not
the 750 basically), and it's constantly at 79 on die, don't freak out.
To keep it below that your only option is to forcefully clock lock it, or
lower the caps for temperature or for the clocking plateau, depending on
what options the manufacturer's control panel offers.

Quadro budget Keplers like the 4200 and the 5200 work the same way I
believe, except that for cards like the 4200 they have such crap specs that
even boosting to cap they are unlikely to even scratch 80C, most of the
time they don't have the transistor count to make it to 70 :p

On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 12:36 AM, hk-v...@iscs-i.com wrote:

  Read many horror stories but never that bad. Even 3D mark never cranked
 it past 70 C.

Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It sounds like you were well past the 15000 hours mark on those components.
Practically no non-enterprise gear is guaranteed to work continuously for
that long. Most is considered to have a reliable life of 10k, after which
you roll the dice.

A couple mobos for what sounds like 25k or more hours of active duty is
nothing to sneeze at.

You could buy/set up better ventilation in the casing, but it's unlikely
that just heat, especially if it was never going past 50 ambient, was
shortening component life much.

And yes, everybody has their stories of hardware that lasted fifteen years,
and cars that were still good after 25 miles, but that's not the
average mileage you should expect from consumer level hardware, or even
non-server oriented hardware in general.


On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 3:08 PM, hk-v...@iscs-i.com wrote:

  Average temp ran around high 50's Celsius and rarely touched 70 C on a
 major render. It was on nearly continuously for 3 years until mobo died in
 Feb then Nov (warranty covered both). Any links for better cooling
 appreciated.

 Thanks,

 Henry

 On 2014-12-11 17:32, James De Colling wrote:

 thats bizarre, I had a quadro4000 in my old machine for 2 years without a
 problem. it was on 24/7

 now I have a 770TI and again, its on 24/7

 maybe look at some better cooling solutions?

 cheers

 james,

 On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:28 AM, hk-vndr hk-v...@iscs-i.com wrote:

  Apologies to my thumbs. I meant how long do you keep your computer on
 with a card that generates such heat?

 In my case, I've had to replace my mobo twice this year from my Nvidia
 quadro 4000.


  Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone


  Original message 
 From: Mirko Jankovic
 Date:12/11/2014 2:32 PM (GMT-05:00)
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Best graphic card for Softimage?

 How long can you can your computer on with this card in it?

 Sry but clarification please?

 On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 2:28 PM, hk-v...@iscs-i.com wrote:

  How long can you can your computer on with this card in it?

 On 2014-12-11 05:36, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

  Got the msi gtx 970 gaming 4g.
 Quite happy with it.

 2014-12-11 10:03 GMT+01:00 Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com:

 right now 970 is best bang for backs.
 they do not heat too much, power consumption is prety low and they do
 really good job.
 and on top of that Redshift as perfect companion ;)
 viewport performance is not that big issue at all between two cards but
 being able to utilise GPU rendering with CUDA is way more higher on the
 list then couple more FPS in viewport

 On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Christoph Muetze c...@glarestudios.de
 wrote:

 I'd stay clear of the ATI/AMD consumer cards if I were you. From our
 experience Soft becomes generally less stable (crashing a lot more),
 and
 the raycast selection is going haywire sometimes.

 Chris

 On 11/12/14 04:44, phil harbath wrote:
  I went Redshift and have been very pleased.  I can get by using a
 lot less computers than before on most projects,  volume smoke is pretty
 much all I use MR for anymore.   I have several computers with a
 combination of 780TI, 770, and 970,  while I think the 780Ti give the best
 performance, it really makes more sense to buy the 970 as they are priced
 better or 980 if you have more cash.  The Redshift say go with the cards
 with the most ram (that would be Titan 6tb, if you got even more cash),
 depends on your needs of course.
 
  From: David Rivera
  Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2014 8:51 PM
  To: Softimage Mailing List
  Subject: Best graphic card for Softimage?
 
  I know this subject has been posted a lot over the years, but it
 happens that I read a benchmark performance between autodesk products on
 certain webpage. They tested Radeons vs Nvidias and turns out that Mudbox
 and Softimage ran better on AMD (Radeons) - this is mental ray render.
 
 
  So I was wondering whether to go full on mental ray (CPU) or take my
 savings and put it on a GPU renderer? Either case, now a days, which is 
 the
 middle ranked graphic card for softimage? (My budget is around 1k).
 
 
  Thanks.
 
  David Rivera
  3D Compositor/Animator
  LinkedIN
  Behance
  VFX Reel
 









-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: [Python] External 3d math library ?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

numpy + scipy offer a lot, but it's more on the maths side of things than
the rather streamlined, relatively elegant and specific items you are used
from XSIMath; it will also miss some things and interoperability between
types you are used to which aren't strictly standard in the actual math
sciences domain (XSIMath falls clearly into applied/specific).

From there you can also poke pypi (the official package repository) at
https://wiki.python.org/moin/CheeseShopTutorial

You can find a bunch of rather good libraries for things like quaternions,
anisotropic arrays and their applications, rotation management, and some
games related stuff that for obvious reasons is very affine with what you
are used to.

There is nothing that is going to be an obvious replacement to the full
extent of functionalities you are used to all in one place, you will have
to pick and choose and collate through your own wrapper to have that kind
of experience again.

iMath is in use all over the place in VFX because it's there, but to be
honest I find it reads and writes rather clumsily, bindings support is
always a roll of the dice, and it's not exactly covering all of XSIMath in
terms of flow, though it offers a lot more as it covers other subjects not
included in XSIMath due to its use in exr and other alembic, things like
signal related problems, spherical problems, harmonics etc.
There used to be a set of 100% complete bindings here:
http://code.google.com/p/pimath/

Which I used with success the last time I trialled it. But those were last
up to date when DrD here in Sydney was still standing, it's probably rather
outdated or even non-functionally obsolete these days.

On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 ILM's IMath? not sure how complete these wrappers are...

 https://code.google.com/p/pimath/
 http://excamera.com/articles/26/doc/imath.html

 but pyalembic uses imath in their examples...
 http://docs.alembic.io/python/index.html



 On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Jeremie Passerin gerem@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Does anyone know about a Python library to deal with the usual 3D math
 we're using in CG.

 Matrices, Quaternion, Transformation Matrices, Vectors...

 I'd like to be able to do this kind of operation outside of Softimage.

 thanks,
 Jeremie





-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

RE: Buy Softimage - is this a real shop?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

It was written between Maya crashes in the five minute intervals it takes
for it to come back up :p
All in good spirit though Graham, you're still good people in my book ;)
On 13 Nov 2014 18:45, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:

 You spent way too much time on that reply. ☺

 Funny though. ☺

 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane
 Sent: 13 November 2014 02:26
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?

 I know, right?

 It's like someone had their pet murdered and minced by the vet who was
 saying it's nothing, don't worry, he'll be fine, and a few years later
 they would still resent a lying, puppy killing vet.
 In that story the vet also invoiced and got paid several times over while
 he was beating the puppy's corpse (and allegedly having necrophiliac farm
 sex with it, but it's never been proven).
 In the vet's defence, he did send a leprous, blind Labrador that routinely
 shits on the carpet as a replacement for the puppy, and insisted it's much
 better and only going to get even better with age.

 I totally can't see why or how people would be upset after all this time ;)

 On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 mailto:graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 Over 4 years ago, and people still won’t let it go…sigh.

 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 Eric Turman
 Sent: 12 November 2014 22:46
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 
 Subject: Re: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?

 Kind of like Softimage's bright future ;P
 On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 mailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

 --




 -=T=-



 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!

RE: Buy Softimage - is this a real shop?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

That sounds like a win win to me. You guys cope less crap, Systems doesn't
replace my monitors twice a week ;)
On 13 Nov 2014 21:28, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:

 5 minutes? So that means that, that if we can improve that, we reduce the
 time for your replies.

 Damn, tricky dilemma. Hard to know what to do for the best here. Lol ☺


 G

 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane
 Sent: 13 November 2014 08:09
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: RE: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?


 It was written between Maya crashes in the five minute intervals it takes
 for it to come back up :p
 All in good spirit though Graham, you're still good people in my book ;)
 On 13 Nov 2014 18:45, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 You spent way too much time on that reply. ☺

 Funny though. ☺

 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 Raffaele Fragapane
 Sent: 13 November 2014 02:26
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 
 Subject: Re: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?

 I know, right?

 It's like someone had their pet murdered and minced by the vet who was
 saying it's nothing, don't worry, he'll be fine, and a few years later
 they would still resent a lying, puppy killing vet.
 In that story the vet also invoiced and got paid several times over while
 he was beating the puppy's corpse (and allegedly having necrophiliac farm
 sex with it, but it's never been proven).
 In the vet's defence, he did send a leprous, blind Labrador that routinely
 shits on the carpet as a replacement for the puppy, and insisted it's much
 better and only going to get even better with age.

 I totally can't see why or how people would be upset after all this time ;)

 On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 mailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 Over 4 years ago, and people still won’t let it go…sigh.

 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.commailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Turman
 Sent: 12 November 2014 22:46
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:
 softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?

 Kind of like Softimage's bright future ;P
 On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 mailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:graham.b...@autodesk.commailto:
 graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

 --




 -=T=-



 --
 Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
 and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Buy Softimage - is this a real shop?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I know, right?

It's like someone had their pet murdered and minced by the vet who was
saying it's nothing, don't worry, he'll be fine, and a few years later
they would still resent a lying, puppy killing vet.
In that story the vet also invoiced and got paid several times over while
he was beating the puppy's corpse (and allegedly having necrophiliac farm
sex with it, but it's never been proven).
In the vet's defence, he did send a leprous, blind Labrador that routinely
shits on the carpet as a replacement for the puppy, and insisted it's much
better and only going to get even better with age.

I totally can't see why or how people would be upset after all this time ;)

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
wrote:

 Over 4 years ago, and people still won’t let it go…sigh.

 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Turman
 Sent: 12 November 2014 22:46
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Buy Softimage -  is this a real shop?

 Kind of like Softimage's bright future ;P

 On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.com
 mailto:graham.b...@autodesk.com wrote:
 If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

 --




 -=T=-




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!