RE: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Valve also used an early dump of what became GATOR (2002-2003) to aid in transferring characters from Max to XSI. I was in the animation rigging department for HL2 and made the migration in mid production.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Houdini attribute transfer does some bloody fantastic things if you use it right. The more I work in houdini, the more I can come to terms with the death of softimage. G On 28/05/2015 12:40, Nicolas Esposito wrote: Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com mailto:zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com mailto:bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com mailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com mailto:car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com mailto:luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com mailto:speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Well it is more matter of if you don;t know what is it and how useful it is then you wont miss it. That is case with a lot of things in Maya that people accepted as truth nuder the sun, and not knowing that it can be better they don't miss it. In one occasion in studio of couple maya guys no one managed to transfer UV map from identical topology model from one to another. After digging in google I managed to find a way, which is some nasty go into hyper-schematic or something dig into hidden notes, cut copy move... manged but man what is 1min job with GATOR turned out to be over hour nightmare in Maya. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up with something like that, and it's shocking... Maya is well known for being You can't do that out-of-the-box, code it yourself, and no one attempted even? For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for facial rigs is a time saver... I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be developedhowever its shocking that something so usefull still isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read ) 2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg zagan...@gmail.com: Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing? Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya with all the weirdness that could occur? On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell bell...@gmail.com wrote: Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool. They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the SDK). Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for deformation. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote: All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider that part of the GATOR sdk *written with my thumbs On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
On 28.05.2015, at 13:50, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: Houdini attribute transfer does some bloody fantastic things if you use it right. The more I work in houdini, the more I can come to terms with the death of softimage. Finally, a mention of Houdini’s Attribute Transfer.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
You need to work on some new material :) On 28 May 2015 at 09:17, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
A simple GATOR replacement would probably refresh the material ... On 28 May 2015 at 15:36, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: You need to work on some new material :) On 28 May 2015 at 09:17, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: I've just noticed that the exact same thread happened on the Fabric mailing-list—someone asked for GATOR and I quoted that foot roll thingy in my reply. I'm so predictable :) On 28 May 2015 at 20:11, Christopher Crouzet christopher.crou...@gmail.com wrote: Beware also to not implement any foot roll in your rigs. http://www.google.com/patents/US7545378 On 28 May 2015 at 19:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides. -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com -- Christopher Crouzet *http://christophercrouzet.com* http://christophercrouzet.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I was replying about who was the design partner, not who used it after the it was released. On 28 May 2015 at 12:03, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: Ehm... MGS4 meets Assassin's Creed As far sa I remember: Konami Sega Square Enix Crytek Namco Capcom Others probably... 2015-05-28 17:57 GMT+02:00 Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com: Or it might have been Sega or Capcomp.. it was definitely one of these three big japan Softimage client. This was all about transferring uv and weighting between game characters and same and different resolutions. On 27 May 2015 at 21:13, Martin Contel martin3d...@gmail.com wrote: Really, for Square?! :) There are still lots of XSI seats here, all of them on the game development teams. At Visual Works (the CG cinematics division) everything is Maya and a tinny bit of Houdini. Cheers, -- Martin Contel CG Supervisor Square Enix (Visual Works Division) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI
RE: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
+1 well stated On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. Correct! It's not the fact that GATOR exists; it's the usability and artist-friendliness of the workflow that make the difference. -- -=T=-
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Ehm... MGS4 meets Assassin's Creed https://youtu.be/U-DrkSQLHsk?t=1m45s As far sa I remember: Konami Sega Square Enix Crytek Namco Capcom Others probably... 2015-05-28 17:57 GMT+02:00 Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com: Or it might have been Sega or Capcomp.. it was definitely one of these three big japan Softimage client. This was all about transferring uv and weighting between game characters and same and different resolutions. On 27 May 2015 at 21:13, Martin Contel martin3d...@gmail.com wrote: Really, for Square?! :) There are still lots of XSI seats here, all of them on the game development teams. At Visual Works (the CG cinematics division) everything is Maya and a tinny bit of Houdini. Cheers, -- Martin Contel CG Supervisor Square Enix (Visual Works Division) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. Correct! It's not the fact that GATOR exists; it's the usability and artist-friendliness of the workflow that make the difference.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I think it doesn't matter that there is a patent around some implementation detail of attribute transfer in XSI, or even who wrote it. I think what people see in a GATOR is a menu item in XSI that will transfer property maps, uv, skinning between objects reliably and without having to understand the details. Why that works is because of decisions in XSI'd design and architecture, because you have to have something that's property-based in the first place and all that cluster updating thing beneath to use it as a live operator. Somebody could totally write yet another attribute transfer tool, but I think what people love IMHO is how XSI's data is structured which allows such a tool to be implemented. On 28 May 2015 at 08:50, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Most likely covered by this one: Transfer of attributes between geometric surfaces of arbitrary topologies with distortion reduction and discontinuity preservation United States 7760201 Issued July 20, 2010 This describes how to transfer surface attributes (such as color, UVs, skinning) between two 3D geometries of different topologies and potentially different type (polygon mesh, NURBS, curve...). In particular, it describes methods to preserve surface discontinuitues (such as UV island seams) and reduce attribute distortion on the target surface. On 28 May 2015 at 08:42, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: Jerome (now at Fabric - go team!) wrote GATOR. I'd ask him about doing it in Fabric but I think he'd stab me if I gave him any more work to do. I don't know if there are patents around the work and that's why other people haven't replicated it. On 28 May 2015 at 08:21, Marc-Andre Carbonneau marc-andre.carbonn...@ubisoft.com wrote: Good morning Lucer, Do you remember who designed and coded GATOR? I'm just curious. Thanks! MAC -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: May-27-15 9:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I used this just the other day for someone at the office as no other software here could transfer UV's! I felt like Supermantill I closed the software and went back to working in Max. : ( On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
GATOR is so useful, it has saved so many productions for me; including ones that went supercritical because of Maya, I just imported into Soft and all the attribute issues went away. Even last year when I had to do several freelance Maya rigs, I brought it into Soft when It was time to point weight and avoided the headaches associated with Maya. The second time that I freelanced at Janimation back in early 2007, Softimage had just revamped their referencing system, and we ran into some showstopper bugs with Softimage 6.0 or 6.01 (can't remember the exact version) during several tight overlapping productions (remember that string of game cinematics, Greg?). There was absolutely no time to code tools to workaround what would have jeopardized the project if we were using Maya or Max. With Softimage, I was able to effectively become Janimation's referencing system by pushing model changes through the pipe...all thanks to GATOR. There is propaganda about Maya having some GATOR-like functionality...don't believe it. While they have some things in Maya now that sort of kind of attempt to approach a semblance of what GATOR can do, they are disparate commands with incomplete and unreliable functionality. Maya does not have a cohesive system like GATOR. The sad thing is that I don't think I want Maya to have something like GATOR. I would anticipate that they would botch it up like they did Trax. On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for sharing, you guys. I think the video is self explanatory. Mari and Substance workflows aren´t as easy as 2 clicks... On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: I used this just the other day for someone at the office as no other software here could transfer UV's! I felt like Supermantill I closed the software and went back to working in Max. : ( On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956* sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- -=T=-
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Sorry, what are you reacting to in Substance Designer and Mari? What's the link with transferring vertex attributes in XSI? On 27 May 2015 at 13:22, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for sharing, you guys. I think the video is self explanatory. Mari and Substance workflows aren´t as easy as 2 clicks... On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: I used this just the other day for someone at the office as no other software here could transfer UV's! I felt like Supermantill I closed the software and went back to working in Max. : ( On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956* sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I´m sorry I don´t have the *exact* video links (because those were *features* back in their day when they first appeared). But this one shows how Substance copies UV attributes to another mesh. The real demo videos for both calms (on substance painter and Mari) showed some resemblance of what Gator does, when overlapping one mesh over the other. (substance and Mari don´t need to do that, all though it´s recommended). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kak9zPIRiY4 On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry, what are you reacting to in Substance Designer and Mari? What's the link with transferring vertex attributes in XSI? On 27 May 2015 at 13:22, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for sharing, you guys. I think the video is self explanatory. Mari and Substance workflows aren´t as easy as 2 clicks... On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: I used this just the other day for someone at the office as no other software here could transfer UV's! I felt like Supermantill I closed the software and went back to working in Max. : ( On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956* sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Thank you for your words Stephen. I have soo many videos stored on my machine since Feb 2013, it´s not even funny.I´m comming out of a huge 78 vfx shots, so I´ll continue posting videos with big/game changing features we´ve been costumed on softimagesince forever... :) David Rivera 3D Compositor/Animator LinkedIN Behance VFX Reel From: Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2015 1:28 AM Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them.Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life.I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 Cinema TV productionVideo Reel -- Best Regards, Stephen P. Davidson (954) 552-7956 sdavidson@3Danimationmagic.comAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Thank you for sharing, you guys. I think the video is self explanatory. Mari and Substance workflows aren´t as easy as 2 clicks... On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: I used this just the other day for someone at the office as no other software here could transfer UV's! I felt like Supermantill I closed the software and went back to working in Max. : ( On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956* sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Thank you Bradley, for that acquintance. I thought Blender guys were the ones who ideally found that method exploit, I´ve seen them in a lot of their rigs (low cage deformer aided by weights from bones, to drive more complex bodies/facials)... I´m glad that came from softimage. Not surprisingly all SI people on Japan is migrating to Blender On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote: Another thing I *loved* about GATOR was the ability to apply it as a live operator. As with so many other things in Soft, you could use it creatively as a tool in ways the designers probably never imagined. For example, using real time GATOR to apply an envelope from a very low dense mesh to a full resolution mesh: Having the rig in ROM poses in one view to see the deformation result, as you adjust the vertex points on the low res mesh in rest pose in another view. The fact that you could add additional vertex points to the low res mesh as needed to tune the envelope result was icing on the cake. On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR is so useful, it has saved so many productions for me; including ones that went supercritical because of Maya, I just imported into Soft and all the attribute issues went away. Even last year when I had to do several freelance Maya rigs, I brought it into Soft when It was time to point weight and avoided the headaches associated with Maya. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Another thing I *loved* about GATOR was the ability to apply it as a live operator. As with so many other things in Soft, you could use it creatively as a tool in ways the designers probably never imagined. For example, using real time GATOR to apply an envelope from a very low dense mesh to a full resolution mesh: Having the rig in ROM poses in one view to see the deformation result, as you adjust the vertex points on the low res mesh in rest pose in another view. The fact that you could add additional vertex points to the low res mesh as needed to tune the envelope result was icing on the cake. On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Eric Turman i.anima...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR is so useful, it has saved so many productions for me; including ones that went supercritical because of Maya, I just imported into Soft and all the attribute issues went away. Even last year when I had to do several freelance Maya rigs, I brought it into Soft when It was time to point weight and avoided the headaches associated with Maya.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I'm using Gator daily...its unbelievable how usefull it is and has been available since 7 years ago and other DCCs still struggling to come up with something like this... For the facial rig I'm developing ( both joint based and morph based ) Gator is a 1-click solution which saves sssoo much time...also I'm using it for quick character rigging/skin swapping/UVs transfer and so on... Its one of the best feature in Softimage to be honest and makes life so easy, especially for re-using data between two ( or more ) different characters... 2015-05-27 8:28 GMT+02:00 Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net: Very nice, Pierre, Just because someone tells you Softimage is EOL, you don't have to believe them. Life is a relative term, anyway. As long as something is useful, I still consider it having life. I never did learn how to use Gator, though. You have inspired me to learn it. Thanks. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012 -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Really, for Square?! :) There are still lots of XSI seats here, all of them on the game development teams. At Visual Works (the CG cinematics division) everything is Maya and a tinny bit of Houdini. Cheers, -- Martin Contel CG Supervisor Square Enix (Visual Works Division) On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator sdk, what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com wrote: For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in 2008. GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared to all the benefits it provides.
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
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. Matt Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 17:10:52 -0500 From: Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com I can't claim credit for that idea coming from SI, only that GATOR made it possible. I believe Houdini likely had an attribute transfer solution long before XSI (if anyone would care to verify). On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Bradley, for that acquintance. I thought Blender guys were the ones who ideally found that method exploit, I?ve seen them in a lot of their rigs (low cage deformer aided by weights from bones, to drive more complex bodies/facials)... I?m glad that came from softimage. Not surprisingly all SI people on Japan is migrating to Blender
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I can't claim credit for that idea coming from SI, only that GATOR made it possible. I believe Houdini likely had an attribute transfer solution long before XSI (if anyone would care to verify). On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Bradley, for that acquintance. I thought Blender guys were the ones who ideally found that method exploit, I´ve seen them in a lot of their rigs (low cage deformer aided by weights from bones, to drive more complex bodies/facials)... I´m glad that came from softimage. Not surprisingly all SI people on Japan is migrating to Blender
Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
I did a lot of car modelling for games, Gator was awesome for doing live uv'sbasically a custom projection. use a dense grid, throw a lattic on it and project away fun times, On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 8:10 AM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote: I can't claim credit for that idea coming from SI, only that GATOR made it possible. I believe Houdini likely had an attribute transfer solution long before XSI (if anyone would care to verify). On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Pierre Schiller activemotionpictu...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Bradley, for that acquintance. I thought Blender guys were the ones who ideally found that method exploit, I´ve seen them in a lot of their rigs (low cage deformer aided by weights from bones, to drive more complex bodies/facials)... I´m glad that came from softimage. Not surprisingly all SI people on Japan is migrating to Blender
GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
Hello team. My grief for EOL just can´t go away that easy; so I setup a video explaining GATOR had softimage people living the 2013-2014 future. By what means? That was the year Substance designer appeared and along with it they featured UV transfer by proximity AND by UV files. The same thing goes for Mari. If you´ve seen the feature videos they are pumping this as industry standard /(yes we knew how easy was to work with GATOR after the pain of PolyTrans). So please give your view and likes to the video if possible. Thank you: https://youtu.be/G2Gni7xj3M4 Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 http://be.net/3dcinetv Cinema TV production Video Reel https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012
