subject:"Softimage Hair options\?"

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-16 Thread Tim Leydecker


Hi guys,


my emaildatabase got fragmented between seperating machines, please allow for
delayed responses.


Thanks for the many ideas and insights shed on Melena and Kristinka as well as 
the
thoughts and opinions on how to potentially best implement a system in 
Softimage.

Personally, I identify at least two groups of users, the first one capable of 
going
in and actively developing a working system, the second group benefiting from 
such
developments rippling into either a (commercial) plug-in or even functionality 
that
makes it into a vanilla installation. Often with some delay and a limited 
feature set
but out-of-the-box functions none the less. Sort of the 2nd wave on the beach.

As much as I´d like to perceive myself differently, I must say I am part of 
group two.

I may be able to find good workflows and good combinations of tools but there´s
limitations in how far I will be able to push beyond already existing tools.

As such, for now, I am looking forward to giving yeti a run for it´s money and
going for Maya as a common factor in bringing things together.

This may be disapointing when seen from a Softimage fan boy perspective but I 
think
it is obvious that being in wave two, I can not afford to limit myself in the 
choices
between existing tools, as I already limited myself to those existing tools.

Still, for Softimage, I would like to see a fully working system at some point.

But that would include styling, dynamics, interactions, animation and transfer 
as well
as actually beautifully endering using an elaborate shading and rendering model.

That´s a lot asked for in an upgrade and I doubt this can get enough momentum 
due
to it´s speciality, there´s other areas that might soak up all those ressources,
like first of all revisiting the rendering situation across the whole programm,
including creating, handling and rendering volumetrics.

Or not to forget, the amount of effort it certainly takes to make Send to 
work flawlessly.

Send to is a very good example of supporting wave two, even if it feels like 
it didn´t
bring anything new, it actually creaked open some of the doors in the way.

Caching is another thing that has brought a lot of benefits.

Cheers,

tim

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-16 Thread Mario Reitbauer

I'm doing a hair job right now with zbrush + softimage ice (melena).
I will post the result as soon as we are finished and recap my experience
using ice.

What many people were allready mentioning is the lack of styling tools for
curves/strands. So you are limited to what you get out of Zbrush.
The next limitation in Softimage is that you can't rly create enough
strands, it's just getting too slow as soon as you add filler to your
styling so I thought (cause I render with arnold) we gonna try to write a
procedural for this to add filler hair at render time.

Other then this the Melena nodes and compounds are quite amazing but need
some time to set your styling up as you want it.
You definitly need to dig into it and use it several times to find out your
best workflow and how and when you connect which compounds to get to a
decent result.

So lets see were I end up. In the end it might be best to use Houdini
together with zbrush or like mentioned Yeti.


2014-02-16 12:04 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de:

 Hi guys,


 my emaildatabase got fragmented between seperating machines, please allow
 for
 delayed responses.


 Thanks for the many ideas and insights shed on Melena and Kristinka as
 well as the
 thoughts and opinions on how to potentially best implement a system in
 Softimage.

 Personally, I identify at least two groups of users, the first one capable
 of going
 in and actively developing a working system, the second group benefiting
 from such
 developments rippling into either a (commercial) plug-in or even
 functionality that
 makes it into a vanilla installation. Often with some delay and a limited
 feature set
 but out-of-the-box functions none the less. Sort of the 2nd wave on the
 beach.

 As much as I´d like to perceive myself differently, I must say I am part
 of group two.

 I may be able to find good workflows and good combinations of tools but
 there´s
 limitations in how far I will be able to push beyond already existing
 tools.

 As such, for now, I am looking forward to giving yeti a run for it´s money
 and
 going for Maya as a common factor in bringing things together.

 This may be disapointing when seen from a Softimage fan boy perspective
 but I think
 it is obvious that being in wave two, I can not afford to limit myself in
 the choices
 between existing tools, as I already limited myself to those existing
 tools.

 Still, for Softimage, I would like to see a fully working system at some
 point.

 But that would include styling, dynamics, interactions, animation and
 transfer as well
 as actually beautifully endering using an elaborate shading and rendering
 model.

 That´s a lot asked for in an upgrade and I doubt this can get enough
 momentum due
 to it´s speciality, there´s other areas that might soak up all those
 ressources,
 like first of all revisiting the rendering situation across the whole
 programm,
 including creating, handling and rendering volumetrics.

 Or not to forget, the amount of effort it certainly takes to make Send
 to work flawlessly.

 Send to is a very good example of supporting wave two, even if it feels
 like it didn´t
 bring anything new, it actually creaked open some of the doors in the way.

 Caching is another thing that has brought a lot of benefits.

 Cheers,

 tim

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-16 Thread Toonafish

hey Mario, how do you solve the problem of creating hair on displaced 
geometry ? I'm currently using Melana and Kristinka strands in 
combination with SI hair, and it's really a hassle sticking the hair to 
the displaced geometry.


btw, reducing the particle display percentage of the pointcloud speeds 
up the display speed when using a lot of strands. But you prolly already 
knew this ;-)


- Ronald

On 2/16/2014 13:37, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

I'm doing a hair job right now with zbrush + softimage ice (melena).
I will post the result as soon as we are finished and recap my 
experience using ice.


What many people were allready mentioning is the lack of styling tools 
for curves/strands. So you are limited to what you get out of Zbrush.
The next limitation in Softimage is that you can't rly create enough 
strands, it's just getting too slow as soon as you add filler to your 
styling so I thought (cause I render with arnold) we gonna try to 
write a procedural for this to add filler hair at render time.


Other then this the Melena nodes and compounds are quite amazing but 
need some time to set your styling up as you want it.
You definitly need to dig into it and use it several times to find out 
your best workflow and how and when you connect which compounds to get 
to a decent result.


So lets see were I end up. In the end it might be best to use Houdini 
together with zbrush or like mentioned Yeti.



2014-02-16 12:04 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de 
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de:


Hi guys,


my emaildatabase got fragmented between seperating machines,
please allow for
delayed responses.


Thanks for the many ideas and insights shed on Melena and
Kristinka as well as the
thoughts and opinions on how to potentially best implement a
system in Softimage.

Personally, I identify at least two groups of users, the first one
capable of going
in and actively developing a working system, the second group
benefiting from such
developments rippling into either a (commercial) plug-in or even
functionality that
makes it into a vanilla installation. Often with some delay and a
limited feature set
but out-of-the-box functions none the less. Sort of the 2nd wave
on the beach.

As much as I´d like to perceive myself differently, I must say I
am part of group two.

I may be able to find good workflows and good combinations of
tools but there´s
limitations in how far I will be able to push beyond already
existing tools.

As such, for now, I am looking forward to giving yeti a run for
it´s money and
going for Maya as a common factor in bringing things together.

This may be disapointing when seen from a Softimage fan boy
perspective but I think
it is obvious that being in wave two, I can not afford to limit
myself in the choices
between existing tools, as I already limited myself to those
existing tools.

Still, for Softimage, I would like to see a fully working system
at some point.

But that would include styling, dynamics, interactions, animation
and transfer as well
as actually beautifully endering using an elaborate shading and
rendering model.

That´s a lot asked for in an upgrade and I doubt this can get
enough momentum due
to it´s speciality, there´s other areas that might soak up all
those ressources,
like first of all revisiting the rendering situation across the
whole programm,
including creating, handling and rendering volumetrics.

Or not to forget, the amount of effort it certainly takes to make
Send to work flawlessly.

Send to is a very good example of supporting wave two, even if
it feels like it didn´t
bring anything new, it actually creaked open some of the doors in
the way.

Caching is another thing that has brought a lot of benefits.

Cheers,

tim


















--
Ronald van Vemden
---
3D Graphics  Animation
Cyberfish Laboratories | www.cyberfish.nl
Toonafish | www.toonafish.nl
tel. +31(0)20 5289291
fax  +31(0)20 5289292
email: ron...@toonafish.nl

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-16 Thread Mario Reitbauer


Problem is that you can only turn it down to 1% :)
Actually I don't use displacement underneeth fur/hair. You wouldn't see 
it anyways.
If I would use it, I would try to push the point/strandposition through 
the displacement map and place the strands to the position they should 
be.

Doing the displacing of the position manually.

Mario


On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 21:28:16 +0100, Toonafish ron...@toonafish.nl 
wrote:

hey Mario, how do you solve the problem of creating hair on displaced
geometry ? I'm currently using Melana and Kristinka strands in
combination with SI hair, and it's really a hassle sticking the hair
to the displaced geometry.

 btw, reducing the particle display percentage of the pointcloud
speeds up the display speed when using a lot of strands. But you
prolly already knew this ;-)

 - Ronald

 On 2/16/2014 13:37, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

I'm doing a hair job right now with zbrush + softimage ice (melena).
 I will post the result as soon as we are finished and recap my
experience using ice.

What many people were allready mentioning is the lack of styling
tools for curves/strands. So you are limited to what you get out of
Zbrush.
The next limitation in Softimage is that you can't rly create enough
strands, it's just getting too slow as soon as you add filler to your
styling so I thought (cause I render with arnold) we gonna try to
write a procedural for this to add filler hair at render time.

Other then this the Melena nodes and compounds are quite amazing but
need some time to set your styling up as you want it.
You definitly need to dig into it and use it several times to find
out your best workflow and how and when you connect which compounds 
to

get to a decent result.

So lets see were I end up. In the end it might be best to use Houdini
together with zbrush or like mentioned Yeti.

2014-02-16 12:04 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker :
 Hi guys,

 my emaildatabase got fragmented between seperating machines, please
allow for
 delayed responses.

 Thanks for the many ideas and insights shed on Melena and Kristinka
as well as the
 thoughts and opinions on how to potentially best implement a system
in Softimage.

 Personally, I identify at least two groups of users, the first one
capable of going
 in and actively developing a working system, the second group
benefiting from such
 developments rippling into either a (commercial) plug-in or even
functionality that
 makes it into a vanilla installation. Often with some delay and a
limited feature set
 but out-of-the-box functions none the less. Sort of the 2nd wave on
the beach.

 As much as I´d like to perceive myself differently, I must say I am
part of group two.

 I may be able to find good workflows and good combinations of tools
but there´s
 limitations in how far I will be able to push beyond already
existing tools.

 As such, for now, I am looking forward to giving yeti a run for
it´s money and
 going for Maya as a common factor in bringing things together.

 This may be disapointing when seen from a Softimage fan boy
perspective but I think
 it is obvious that being in wave two, I can not afford to limit
myself in the choices
 between existing tools, as I already limited myself to those
existing tools.

 Still, for Softimage, I would like to see a fully working system at
some point.

 But that would include styling, dynamics, interactions, animation
and transfer as well
 as actually beautifully endering using an elaborate shading and
rendering model.

 That´s a lot asked for in an upgrade and I doubt this can get
enough momentum due
 to it´s speciality, there´s other areas that might soak up all
those ressources,
 like first of all revisiting the rendering situation across the
whole programm,
 including creating, handling and rendering volumetrics.

 Or not to forget, the amount of effort it certainly takes to make
Send to work flawlessly.

 Send to is a very good example of supporting wave two, even if it
feels like it didn´t
 bring anything new, it actually creaked open some of the doors in
the way.

 Caching is another thing that has brought a lot of benefits.

 Cheers,

 tim

--
Ronald van Vemden
---
3D Graphics  Animation
Cyberfish Laboratories | www.cyberfish.nl [2]
Toonafish | www.toonafish.nl [3]
tel. +31(0)20 5289291
fax +31(0)20 5289292
email: ron...@toonafish.nl [4]


Links:
--
[1] mailto:bauero...@gmx.de
[2] http://www.cyberfish.nl
[3] http://www.toonafish.nl
[4] mailto:ron...@toonafish.nl

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Felix Geremus

...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking
at hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job
but it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it
requires a
lot of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up,
with substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices.
We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on
technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but
I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

-Original Message-
From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker
Sent: 8 février 2014 07:26
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage Hair options?

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
Yeti, one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name
from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample
image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia
and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
find something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s
hair
shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into
either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and
it seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur
testing to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has
a
variety of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if
tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the
built-in hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide
hair strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via
vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair
to be and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink
frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
important
for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better
make sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the
hair
setup you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair
style, even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You
need to move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Matt Morris

, but that is my answer.

On 14 February 2014 00:51, Mathias N mdawn...@gmail.com wrote:

Sticking with the idea of a complete solution within Softimage, what
would your definition of heavier be?

On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going to
need something a little heavier to go forward.

On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

https://vimeo.com/80382153

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking
at hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the
job
but it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it
requires a
lot of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up,
with substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices.
We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on
technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but
I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

(Thread)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani
Garcia
and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in
those beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester
Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and
it seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur
testing to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti
has a
variety of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if
tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the
built-in hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide
hair strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
important
for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better
make sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the
hair
setup you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair
style, even if your source and target emitter topology are the same.
You
need to move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh
as
the emitter. The docs

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

.


 I toyed with the notion of a node graph like yeti's but from what i
 could see of it so far, it is very linear, nowhere near as fun as ICE, so 
 a
 cool idea, for visualisation but i'd have to see a little more matured
 version to be sold.

 i doubt anyone will ever implement any of this, this is just a lot of
 pipe dreaming, but that is my answer.






 On 14 February 2014 00:51, Mathias N mdawn...@gmail.com wrote:

 Sticking with the idea of a complete solution within Softimage, what
 would your definition of heavier be?


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

 And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going to
 need something a little heavier to go forward.


 On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

 https://vimeo.com/80382153


 On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 A new hair system is kinda over due. :(


 On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

 Hi Tim,

 Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

 I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also
 looking at hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka 
 does
 the job but it is very far from being an out of the box solution and 
 it
 requires a lot of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a 
 problem
 pops up, with substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our 
 own
 devices. We usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the 
 time
 on technical details vs real look dev.  I thought you should know :).

 From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender
 but I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

 Good luck in your search !

 Luc Girard // SHED
 VFX artist
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM


 -Original Message-
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim
 Leydecker
 Sent: 8 février 2014 07:26
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Softimage Hair options?

 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
 Yeti, one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s 
 name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really nice 
 sample
 image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

 (Thread)
 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

 (Image)
 https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


 Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing
 (3dsMax) hair-farm into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props 
 to Dani
 Garcia and Steven Caron.
 That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

 http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

 For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in
 those beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on 
 Lester Banks


 http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

 --

 I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need
 to find something that has potential to be useable for testing 
 Redshift´s
 hair shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates 
 seamlessly
 into either Maya/Max/Softimage.

 The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well
 and it seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple 
 hair/fur
 testing to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti 
 has a
 variety of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date 
 if
 tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

 I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya,
 it´ll be Maya.

 I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
 compensate that sad fact.

 Cheers,

 tim







 On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
  Hi Tim,
 
  I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the
 built-in hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).
 
  A few tips about working with built-in hair:
 
  Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every
 vertex,
  hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide
 hair strands manually, which can be counter-productive and 
 -intuitive.
 
  If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via
 vertex
  colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your
 hair to be and where you want certain features (transparency, 
 density, kink
  frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
 important for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose  eye lids.
  So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better
 make sure your topology works not only for animation but also for 
 the hair
 setup you have in mind.
 
  Don't rely on the built

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Emilio Hernandez

 ever layer you put them, influenced by the closest guide on that
 layer.


 And that's it, these are some of the things i would like to see in a
 heavier hair system.


 I toyed with the notion of a node graph like yeti's but from what i
 could see of it so far, it is very linear, nowhere near as fun as ICE, 
 so a
 cool idea, for visualisation but i'd have to see a little more matured
 version to be sold.

 i doubt anyone will ever implement any of this, this is just a lot of
 pipe dreaming, but that is my answer.






 On 14 February 2014 00:51, Mathias N mdawn...@gmail.com wrote:

 Sticking with the idea of a complete solution within Softimage, what
 would your definition of heavier be?


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

 And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going
 to need something a little heavier to go forward.


 On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

 https://vimeo.com/80382153


 On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 A new hair system is kinda over due. :(


 On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

 Hi Tim,

 Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

 I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also
 looking at hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka 
 does
 the job but it is very far from being an out of the box solution 
 and it
 requires a lot of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a 
 problem
 pops up, with substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our 
 own
 devices. We usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of 
 the time
 on technical details vs real look dev.  I thought you should know 
 :).

 From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender
 but I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

 Good luck in your search !

 Luc Girard // SHED
 VFX artist
 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM


 -Original Message-
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim
 Leydecker
 Sent: 8 février 2014 07:26
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Softimage Hair options?

 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
 Yeti, one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s 
 name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really nice 
 sample
 image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

 (Thread)
 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

 (Image)
 https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


 Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing
 (3dsMax) hair-farm into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props 
 to Dani
 Garcia and Steven Caron.
 That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

 http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

 For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in
 those beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on 
 Lester Banks


 http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

 --

 I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need
 to find something that has potential to be useable for testing 
 Redshift´s
 hair shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates 
 seamlessly
 into either Maya/Max/Softimage.

 The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well
 and it seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple 
 hair/fur
 testing to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti 
 has a
 variety of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date 
 if
 tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

 I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya,
 it´ll be Maya.

 I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin
 can´t compensate that sad fact.

 Cheers,

 tim







 On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
  Hi Tim,
 
  I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the
 built-in hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).
 
  A few tips about working with built-in hair:
 
  Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every
 vertex,
  hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide
 hair strands manually, which can be counter-productive and 
 -intuitive.
 
  If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via
 vertex
  colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your
 hair to be and where you want certain features (transparency, 
 density, kink
  frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
 important for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose  eye lids.
  So, before you move the mesh

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

per layer. (this would allow you to rapidly
test incremental density simulations, on the fly without having to dive
into an ice tree or bring up a ppg ).

3) I'm a big fan of the M tool in SI, i love the 3 small grey icons that
appear at the bottom of the view port, (manipulate, magnet and weld) i just
wish it was customisable with even more tools !

In this spirit i would like to have a small library of icons on the hair
system panel, icons for guide painting, and manipulation: paint/erase
grow/cut, brush/frizz,orient ...etc. i would like it to be possible to
click and drag these icons into a small tray on the viewport like the M
tool small grey icons. so you can have your own customizable loadout.

4) Convert To: a series of utilities that allow you to convert elements,
primitives or meshes, into hair guides; so you can choose to draw a curve
and then click convert to guides or strands, upon which you get prompted
to choose an existing layer to add to, or to create a layer for this new
hair element. if you choose a mesh like a rectangle, it would give you the
options on how you would like the hairs to populate the inside of the mesh,
by length? what density? etc...

note: if you convert to a guide, them the elements will become guides, if
you choose convert to strand then the elements will become hair in witch
ever layer you put them, influenced by the closest guide on that layer.

And that's it, these are some of the things i would like to see in a
heavier hair system.

I toyed with the notion of a node graph like yeti's but from what i could
see of it so far, it is very linear, nowhere near as fun as ICE, so a cool
idea, for visualisation but i'd have to see a little more matured version
to be sold.

i doubt anyone will ever implement any of this, this is just a lot of
pipe dreaming, but that is my answer.

On 14 February 2014 00:51, Mathias N mdawn...@gmail.com wrote:

Sticking with the idea of a complete solution within Softimage, what
would your definition of heavier be?

On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going to
need something a little heavier to go forward.

On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

https://vimeo.com/80382153

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but
I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

(Thread)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

The combination

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Steven Caron

i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

:- (


On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

how about a system where you create and style guides before sending the
data to ICE ? melena has a create strands from curve node, it seems
doable...


On 15 February 2014 02:13, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.comwrote:

 :- (


 On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Steven Caron

ya, if you want to make your own curve tools that might turn out better..
but ask eugen sares how this area is lacking too ;)


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 how about a system where you create and style guides before sending the
 data to ICE ? melena has a create strands from curve node, it seems
 doable...


 On 15 February 2014 02:13, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 :- (


 On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

If you wanted to make it all within SI, but what if it was an external
engine, like yeti, or fabric ?


On 15 February 2014 02:19, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 ya, if you want to make your own curve tools that might turn out better..
 but ask eugen sares how this area is lacking too ;)


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 how about a system where you create and style guides before sending the
 data to ICE ? melena has a create strands from curve node, it seems
 doable...


 On 15 February 2014 02:13, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 :- (


 On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in 
 turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow 
 for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity 
 and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Steven Caron

well, fabric has already proven they can. i mean, integrate visualization
tools into softimage but have the data be separated. as long as you have
good support for your target renderer (ie. render time procedural) and good
support for caching softimage is just a host.

it is a question of, interest, time, and money... someone has to be
interested in investing the time to make some (little) money.


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:39 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 If you wanted to make it all within SI, but what if it was an external
 engine, like yeti, or fabric ?


 On 15 February 2014 02:19, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 ya, if you want to make your own curve tools that might turn out better..
 but ask eugen sares how this area is lacking too ;)


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 how about a system where you create and style guides before sending the
 data to ICE ? melena has a create strands from curve node, it seems
 doable...


 On 15 February 2014 02:13, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 :- (


 On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in 
 turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow 
 for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity 
 and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

so the question is can Softimage play both host to an external engine, and
also be able to interpret subsequent data rom said engine through ICE. i
don't think render support would be a problem if the hair ends up being
strands, it wouldn't really matter that the guides aren't render supported,
we just need them for styling and maybe simulation.


On 15 February 2014 03:24, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 well, fabric has already proven they can. i mean, integrate visualization
 tools into softimage but have the data be separated. as long as you have
 good support for your target renderer (ie. render time procedural) and good
 support for caching softimage is just a host.

 it is a question of, interest, time, and money... someone has to be
 interested in investing the time to make some (little) money.


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:39 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 If you wanted to make it all within SI, but what if it was an external
 engine, like yeti, or fabric ?


 On 15 February 2014 02:19, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 ya, if you want to make your own curve tools that might turn out
 better.. but ask eugen sares how this area is lacking too ;)


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 how about a system where you create and style guides before sending the
 data to ICE ? melena has a create strands from curve node, it seems
 doable...


 On 15 February 2014 02:13, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 :- (


 On 15 February 2014 02:04, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 i experimented with a custom tool, which would write ice data arrays
 directly, so this could be for brushing existing strands, cutting 
 strands,
 etc. i found the SDK wasn't behaving correctly in this area, i stopped 
 it.



 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:


 ICE on it's own won't yield a solution, a method of interaction is
 required, you need to be able to interact with the hair directly, with a
 pen and tablet. i thought maybe this hair system could take care of the
 guides, once this is done you import the guide data into ICE, which in 
 turn
 takes care of populating, generating strands and such. this would allow 
 for
 an artistic manipulation of the guides while maintaining the modularity 
 and
 versatility of ICE.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Steven Caron

the benefit of using ICE becomes less and less if you are generating your
own tech.


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 so the question is can Softimage play both host to an external engine, and
 also be able to interpret subsequent data rom said engine through ICE. i
 don't think render support would be a problem if the hair ends up being
 strands, it wouldn't really matter that the guides aren't render supported,
 we just need them for styling and maybe simulation.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-14 Thread Sebastien Sterling

Very true, and i remarked as much earlier. but interesting things might
still be possible, if ICE could add to the system instead of being the
system. you might not get all the functionality, but you could get some
nice effects on the hair systems this way.


On 15 February 2014 03:42, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com wrote:

 the benefit of using ICE becomes less and less if you are generating your
 own tech.


 On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Sebastien Sterling 
 sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

 so the question is can Softimage play both host to an external engine,
 and also be able to interpret subsequent data rom said engine through ICE.
 i don't think render support would be a problem if the hair ends up being
 strands, it wouldn't really matter that the guides aren't render supported,
 we just need them for styling and maybe simulation.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Sebastien Sterling

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking at
hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job but
it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it requires a lot
of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with
substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but I've
yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti, one
reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from another
maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample image of a
bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair
shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into
either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be
and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink frizz)
to change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure
your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you
have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to
move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Ed Manning

https://vimeo.com/80382153

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking at
hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job but
it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it requires a lot
of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with
substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but I've
yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti, one
reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from another
maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample image of a
bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair
shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into
either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be
and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink frizz)
to change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup
you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to
move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Sebastien Sterling

I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going to need
something a little heavier to go forward.

On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

https://vimeo.com/80382153

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking at
hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job but
it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it requires a lot
of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with
substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but I've
yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample
image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair
shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into
either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be
and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink frizz)
to change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup
you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to
move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Mathias N

Sticking with the idea of a complete solution within Softimage, what would
your definition of heavier be?

On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

I saw that the first day it was up Eddie

And as jawdroppingly cool as it is, i have a feeling we are going to need
something a little heavier to go forward.

On 14 February 2014 00:01, Ed Manning etmth...@gmail.com wrote:

https://vimeo.com/80382153

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:

A new hair system is kinda over due. :(

On 12 February 2014 16:54, Luc Girard l...@shedmtl.com wrote:

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking at
hair solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job but
it is very far from being an out of the box solution and it requires a lot
of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with
substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but I've
yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample
image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
find something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair
shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into
either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to
be and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink
frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially important
for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup
you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to
move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Sebastien Sterling

of the box solution and it requires a lot
of RnD to maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with
substeps motion blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We
usually prevail but we end up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but
I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample
image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to
be and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink
frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
important
for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair
setup
you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to
move in again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as
the emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh
cannot collide with its own emitter, so you have to duplicate the
source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is, create more actual
polygons) and use that as the collision object. That would still be
acceptable, if it worked, which it does not. What I found after
tedious testing was that any collision testing fails when your
emitter is a subd mesh, independent of what you have it collide with
(itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I
ran into for which I could not find a solution. Thankfully my fur was
rather short and the character had a lot of secondary motion, so it looks
alife enough (besides some problems when bending arms, which are hardly
noticeable in the animation in my case). From what I can tell it looks
like
collision is always computed against a simplified collision sphere
representation of the collision object, no matter what you set for
collision accuracy and shape, deforming shape, etc. It just

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-13 Thread Mathias N

spending nearly 50% of the time on
technical
details vs real look dev. I thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but
I've yet to do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample
image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)
https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur
testing
to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety
of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to
actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via
vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to
be and where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink
frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This is especially
important
for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair
setup
you have in mind.

Sometimes, when saving and reloading a scene some hair strands
(like 1
out of 1000) would suddenly stick in some random direction. I had
the impression

RE: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-12 Thread Luc Girard

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the way you mentioned our projects :) .

I would like to chime in and say that we, at Shed, are also looking at hair 
solutions actively. Our solution based on Kristinka does the job but it is very 
far from being an out of the box solution and it requires a lot of RnD to 
maintain as it not supported by AD. If a problem pops up, with substeps motion 
blur per example, we are left to our own devices. We usually prevail but we end 
up spending nearly 50% of the time on technical details vs real look dev.  I 
thought you should know :).

From what I've seen around, Yeti seems to be a good contender but I've yet to 
do a full production setup with it.

Good luck in your search !

Luc Girard // SHED
VFX artist
1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8
T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM


-Original Message-
From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker
Sent: 8 février 2014 07:26
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Softimage Hair options?

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti, one 
reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from another maya 
maling list and another because of the really nice sample image of a bear 
posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax) hair-farm 
into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those beautiful 
shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

--

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find 
something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading 
approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either 
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it seems 
it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to 
something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of 
licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to actually 
finish something beyond spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t compensate 
that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim







On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
 Hi Tim,

 I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in hairfur 
 of Softimage /2014SP2).

 A few tips about working with built-in hair:

 Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, 
 hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands 
 manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.

 If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex 
 colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and 
 where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink  frizz) to 
 change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for areas 
 like hand and feet, as well as nose  eye lids.
 So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure your 
 topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you have in 
 mind.

 Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does 
 mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style, even if 
 your source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to move in 
 again and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.

 If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as 
 the emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh 
 cannot collide with its own emitter, so you have to duplicate the 
 source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is, create more actual 
 polygons) and use that as the collision object. That would still be 
 acceptable, if it worked, which it does not. What I found after 
 tedious testing was that any collision testing fails when your emitter is a 
 subd mesh, independent of what you have it collide with (itself or another 
 mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I ran into for which I 
 could not find a solution. Thankfully my fur was rather short and the 
 character had a lot of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides 
 some problems when bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation 
 in my case). From what I can tell

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-10 Thread Tim Leydecker


Thanks Mario,


you´re right, once I realized I could use masked areas and morphtargets
it was a lot easier to control the hair grooming in zbrush.

I haven´t managed to put together a simple sample moustache kind of file
to test the import into Maya/Softimage and dynamics, yet. That´ll have
to wait until at least next weekend before I can put everything together.

Thanks again for pointing at ZBrush/fibermesh, I would have discarded this 
option to early.

Cheers,

tim



On 09.02.2014 12:40, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

You have to play around with the brushes, as soon as you are familar with what 
burshes you can use it's quite nice.
Just to mention: groom length, move, smooth are some you definitly need 
(shorten and smooth them with smooth brush then move them in position with 
lengthen or smooth brush).


2014-02-09 11:44 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de 
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de:

Hey Mario,

how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found
it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have
another look into some of the tutorials today.

I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow.

Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export
the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems
there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith
posted in his 2012ish examples.

Cheers,

tim






On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush with 
fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin
(http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands 
http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.
You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to finalize 
your hair grooming.

Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it comes 
to brushing your hair.
I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for brushing 
your guides before you add stuff on top)

cheers Mario



On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak artur.w...@gmail.com 
mailto:artur.w...@gmail.com wrote:

Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti.
Textures were applied then in Xsi.

Artur

-- Wiadomość oryginalna --
Od: olivier jeannel
Do:
Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? 
Pointcache
? Alembic ? Ass ?
Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

Olivier

Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth
porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling  wrote:

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say
its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people
acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see 
is
ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go 
for
Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of
a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later
version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the
editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a
large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at 
this
stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may
commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin

On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker  wrote:
  Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
here:

(Thread)

(Image)

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-10 Thread John Richard Sanchez

Maya nhair has been pretty good for me especially with collisions. I
usually animate in xsi and send cached animation and camera to Maya to
render a hair pass.


On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 4:25 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

 Thanks Mario,


 you´re right, once I realized I could use masked areas and morphtargets
 it was a lot easier to control the hair grooming in zbrush.

 I haven´t managed to put together a simple sample moustache kind of file
 to test the import into Maya/Softimage and dynamics, yet. That´ll have
 to wait until at least next weekend before I can put everything together.

 Thanks again for pointing at ZBrush/fibermesh, I would have discarded this
 option to early.

 Cheers,

 tim




 On 09.02.2014 12:40, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

 You have to play around with the brushes, as soon as you are familar with
 what burshes you can use it's quite nice.
 Just to mention: groom length, move, smooth are some you definitly need
 (shorten and smooth them with smooth brush then move them in position with
 lengthen or smooth brush).


 2014-02-09 11:44 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de mailto:
 bauero...@gmx.de:


 Hey Mario,

 how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found
 it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have
 another look into some of the tutorials today.

 I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow.

 Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export
 the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems
 there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith
 posted in his 2012ish examples.

 Cheers,

 tim






 On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

 I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush
 with fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin
 (http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands 
 http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.

 You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to
 finalize your hair grooming.

 Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it
 comes to brushing your hair.
 I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for
 brushing your guides before you add stuff on top)

 cheers Mario



 On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak 
 artur.w...@gmail.com mailto:artur.w...@gmail.com wrote:

 Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from
 yeti.
 Textures were applied then in Xsi.

 Artur

 -- Wiadomość oryginalna --
 Od: olivier jeannel
 Do:
 Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
 Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

 How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ?
 Pointcache
 ? Alembic ? Ass ?
 Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

 Olivier

 Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

 Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort
 of
 kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is
 worth
 porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

 On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling  wrote:

 Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have
 to say
 its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen
 people
 acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i
 can see is
 ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you
 to go for
 Arnold or vray renderman...

 A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the
 possibility of
 a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the
 response.

 Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
 integration for rendering preview which may be available in a
 later
 version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of
 the
 editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D
 application is a
 large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI
 version at this
 stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a
 studio may
 commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do
 this.

 We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

 All the best,
 Colin

 On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker  wrote:
   Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial
 of
 Yeti,
 one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s
 name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really
 nice
 sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-10 Thread Tim Leydecker


Hi John,

thanks for the workflow tip.

I went through the GoZ and Export Curves options of ZBrush Fibermeshes 
yesterday,
then either exporting the GoZ (polystrips) result from Maya to Softimage (as 
*.obj)
or assigning an exisiting nhair system to the ZBrush curves imported into Maya 
as *.ma.


I didn´t have time to fully get to understand the nhair system, just went with 
Pfx strokes
on curves. Set to dynamic, I managed to choke my setup with ca. 10 000 curves 
and 10 hair strands
per curve. I would think I´ll need around 250 000 hairs rendered but might be 
able to optimize the
amount of control curves to a more responsive amount. Maybe I just created too 
many dependencies
from the imported curves to the hairfollicles to the pfx strokes in the hair 
system.

The results I produced looked like crap, for a number of reasons. Not worth 
posting a sample, yet.

What are you using inside Softimage to render the nhair?

Strands?

Do you go with mR or rely on a renderman/arnold renderer?

VRay?

I am biased towards hoping to render the (follicle) hair curves directly, as 
that would give
identical results in both Softimage and Maya, e.g. the same curves, the same 
distribution
and might minimize overheads.

Cheers,

tim











On 10.02.2014 20:51, John Richard Sanchez wrote:

Maya nhair has been pretty good for me especially with collisions. I usually 
animate in xsi and send cached animation and camera to Maya to render a hair 
pass.


On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 4:25 AM, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de 
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

Thanks Mario,


you´re right, once I realized I could use masked areas and morphtargets
it was a lot easier to control the hair grooming in zbrush.

I haven´t managed to put together a simple sample moustache kind of file
to test the import into Maya/Softimage and dynamics, yet. That´ll have
to wait until at least next weekend before I can put everything together.

Thanks again for pointing at ZBrush/fibermesh, I would have discarded this 
option to early.

Cheers,

tim




On 09.02.2014 12:40, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

You have to play around with the brushes, as soon as you are familar 
with what burshes you can use it's quite nice.
Just to mention: groom length, move, smooth are some you definitly need 
(shorten and smooth them with smooth brush then move them in position with 
lengthen or smooth brush).


2014-02-09 11:44 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de mailto:bauero...@gmx.de 
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de mailto:bauero...@gmx.de:


 Hey Mario,

 how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found
 it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have
 another look into some of the tutorials today.

 I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow.

 Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export
 the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems
 there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith
 posted in his 2012ish examples.

 Cheers,

 tim






 On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

 I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush 
with fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin
 (http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands 
http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands
http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands 
http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.

 You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to 
finalize your hair grooming.

 Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when 
it comes to brushing your hair.
 I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for 
brushing your guides before you add stuff on top)

 cheers Mario



 On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak 
artur.w...@gmail.com mailto:artur.w...@gmail.com mailto:artur.w...@gmail.com
mailto:artur.w...@gmail.com wrote:

 Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair 
from yeti.
 Textures were applied then in Xsi.

 Artur

 -- Wiadomość oryginalna --
 Od: olivier jeannel
 Do:
 Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
 Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

 How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? 
Pointcache
 ? Alembic ? Ass ?
 Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

 Olivier

 Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

 Maybe

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-09 Thread Tim Leydecker


Hey Mario,

how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found
it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have
another look into some of the tutorials today.

I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow.

Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export
the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems
there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith
posted in his 2012ish examples.

Cheers,

tim





On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush with fibremesh 
and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin
(http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.
You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to finalize your hair 
grooming.

Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it comes to 
brushing your hair.
I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for brushing your 
guides before you add stuff on top)

cheers Mario



On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak artur.w...@gmail.com 
wrote:

Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti.
Textures were applied then in Xsi.

Artur

-- Wiadomość oryginalna --
Od: olivier jeannel
Do:
Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache
? Alembic ? Ass ?
Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

Olivier

Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth
porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling  wrote:

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say
its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people
acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is
ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for
Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of
a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later
version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the
editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a
large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at this
stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may
commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin

On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker  wrote:
 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
here:

(Thread)

(Image)

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects
there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

--

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
find something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to
something actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I
might find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
 Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be
counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be
and where you want certain features
(transparency, density, kink  frizz) to change and over which
distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and
feet, as well as nose

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-09 Thread Mario Reitbauer

You have to play around with the brushes, as soon as you are familar with
what burshes you can use it's quite nice.
Just to mention: groom length, move, smooth are some you definitly need
(shorten and smooth them with smooth brush then move them in position with
lengthen or smooth brush).


2014-02-09 11:44 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de:

 Hey Mario,

 how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found
 it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have
 another look into some of the tutorials today.

 I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow.

 Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export
 the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems
 there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith
 posted in his 2012ish examples.

 Cheers,

 tim






 On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote:

 I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush with
 fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin
 (http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.
 You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to finalize your
 hair grooming.

 Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it comes to
 brushing your hair.
 I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for brushing
 your guides before you add stuff on top)

 cheers Mario



 On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak artur.w...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti.
 Textures were applied then in Xsi.

 Artur

 -- Wiadomość oryginalna --
 Od: olivier jeannel
 Do:
 Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
 Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

 How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache
 ? Alembic ? Ass ?
 Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

 Olivier

 Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

 Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
 kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth
 porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

 On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling  wrote:

 Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say
 its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people
 acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is
 ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for
 Arnold or vray renderman...

 A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of
 a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

 Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
 integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later
 version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the
 editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a
 large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at this
 stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may
 commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this.

 We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

 All the best,
 Colin

 On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker  wrote:
  Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
 Yeti,
 one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
 sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
 here:

 (Thread)

 (Image)

 Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
 hair-farm into Softimage
 from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
 That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

 For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
 beautiful shed projects
 there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

 --

 I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
 find something
 that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
 approach when
 applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
 Maya/Max/Softimage.

 The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
 seems it´ll be
 easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to
 something actually looking
 good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I
 might find atractive
 at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
 spare-time doodling.

 I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
 be Maya.

 I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
 compensate that sad fact.

 Cheers,

 tim

 On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
  Hi Tim,

 I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
 hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

 A few tips about working with built-in hair:

 Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
 hence dense

Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Tim Leydecker


Hi guys,

what would be a convenient way to create,style and control hair
in Softimage, with lengths up to 10-12 inches and ideally
both a good collision model and dedicated styling tools?

Which Softimage version would you suggest, e.g. 2014sp2?

I´m a novice with hair and fur but would like to set up
a manageable sample/test that ideally works with Arnold
and Redshift.

Is it possible to work generic or transfer results from,
say Yeti into Softimage?

Would you recommend actually leaning towards Maya for such
a task, either going directly to Yeti or similar?

I know those are fuzzy questions, I guess I´m actually looking
for a biased answer regarding any of the various hair plugin options
for any of the major three apps, e.g. max/maya/softimage.

Sofar, I´ve found the following options:

hairfarm, yeti, ornatrix, shavehaircut, maya hair, maya xgen hair in 2014ext
and the cinema4d hair options (shadowmapped).

Admittedly, that´s a lot of options and I find it difficult to bet
my time-investment onto any of them since I simply know bling about pro´s or 
con´s.

Cheers,


tim

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Stefan Kubicek


Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in  
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).


A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence  
dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands  
manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.


If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex  
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and  
where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink  frizz) to  
change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for  
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose  eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure  
your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you  
have in mind.


Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly  
work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style, even if your  
source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to move in again  
and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.


If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the  
emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot  
collide with its own emitter, so you have to duplicate the source mesh and  
subdivide it for real (that is, create more actual polygons) and use that  
as the collision object. That would still be acceptable, if it worked,  
which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that any  
collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent of  
what you have it collide with (itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks  
and is the biggest problem I ran into for which I could not find a  
solution. Thankfully my fur was rather short and the character had a lot  
of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides some problems when  
bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation in my case).  
From what I can tell it looks like collision is always computed against a  
simplified collision sphere representation of the collision object, no  
matter what you set for collision  accuracy and shape, deforming shape,  
etc. It just doesn't work, at least not for me.


Sometimes, when saving and reloading a scene some hair strands (like 1 out  
of 1000) would suddenly stick in some random direction. I had the  
impression that it helps to always collapse the modeling stack before  
saving, at least it never occurred again in final stages of production  
when the fur description was final and not changed anymore.


Next time I will surely look at Kristinka or Melena. AS for simulation...I  
believe there was a Strand Simulation framework with self collision  
introduced on softimage.tv some weeks ago that looked promising, I haven't  
heard of ne1 using it for hair so far, mayb someone else can comment on  
that? Would love to hear some ideas on this as well.


Good luck,

Stefan



  Hi guys,


what would be a convenient way to create,style and control hair
in Softimage, with lengths up to 10-12 inches and ideally
both a good collision model and dedicated styling tools?

Which Softimage version would you suggest, e.g. 2014sp2?

I´m a novice with hair and fur but would like to set up
a manageable sample/test that ideally works with Arnold
and Redshift.

Is it possible to work generic or transfer results from,
say Yeti into Softimage?

Would you recommend actually leaning towards Maya for such
a task, either going directly to Yeti or similar?

I know those are fuzzy questions, I guess I´m actually looking
for a biased answer regarding any of the various hair plugin options
for any of the major three apps, e.g. max/maya/softimage.

Sofar, I´ve found the following options:

hairfarm, yeti, ornatrix, shavehaircut, maya hair, maya xgen hair in  
2014ext

and the cinema4d hair options (shadowmapped).

Admittedly, that´s a lot of options and I find it difficult to bet
my time-investment onto any of them since I simply know bling about  
pro´s or con´s.


Cheers,


tim



--
---
   Stefan Kubicek
---
   keyvis digital imagery
  Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
   A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
 Phone:+43/699/12614231
  www.keyvis.at  ste...@keyvis.at
--  This email and its attachments are   --
--confidential and for the recipient only--

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Tim Leydecker

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax) hair-farm
into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those beautiful
shed projects
there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading approach
when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it seems
it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something
actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might find
atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time
doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t compensate
that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in hairfur of
Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence dense
meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands manually, which
can be
counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex colors),
you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and where you
want certain features
(transparency, density, kink frizz) to change and over which distance/area. This
is especially important for areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure your
topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you have in
mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly work but has a
tendency to blur the transferred hair style, even if your source and target
emitter
topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce details in the
fur that got lost.

If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the
emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot collide
with its own emitter, so you
have to duplicate the source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is, create
more actual polygons) and use that as the collision object. That would still be
acceptable, if it
worked, which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that any
collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent of what
you have it collide with
(itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I ran
into for which I could not find a solution. Thankfully my fur was rather short
and the character had a
lot of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides some problems when
bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation in my case). From
what I can tell it looks
like collision is always computed against a simplified collision sphere
representation of the collision object, no matter what you set for collision
accuracy and shape, deforming
shape, etc. It just doesn't work, at least not for me.

Sometimes, when saving and reloading a scene some hair strands (like 1 out of
1000) would suddenly stick in some random direction. I had the impression that
it helps to always
collapse the modeling stack before saving, at least it never occurred again in
final stages of production when the fur description was final and not changed
anymore.

Next time I will surely look at Kristinka or Melena. AS for simulation...I
believe there was a Strand Simulation framework with self collision introduced
on softimage.tv some weeks
ago that looked promising, I haven't heard of ne1 using it for hair so far,
mayb someone else can comment on that? Would love to hear some ideas on this as
well.

Good luck,

Stefan

Hi guys,

what would be a convenient way to create,style and control hair
in Softimage, with lengths up to 10-12 inches and ideally
both a good collision model

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Sebastien Sterling

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say its
pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people acclimatise to
it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is ironically, it
doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for Arnold or vray
renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of a
Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti integration
for rendering preview which may be available in a later version but at this
time we're not planning an XSI version of the editing tools.  Adding in
support for a whole new 3D application is a large task and we haven't had
enough demand for an XSI version at this stage.  If at some point that
changes and it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of licenses
we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin



On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
 one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
 sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

 (Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

 (Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/
 994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


 Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
 hair-farm into Softimage
 from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
 That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

 http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

 For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
 beautiful shed projects
 there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

 http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-
 and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

 --

 I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
 something
 that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
 approach when
 applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
 Maya/Max/Softimage.

 The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
 seems it´ll be
 easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something
 actually looking
 good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might
 find atractive
 at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time
 doodling.

 I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya.

 I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
 compensate that sad fact.

 Cheers,

 tim








 On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

 Hi Tim,

 I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
 hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

 A few tips about working with built-in hair:

 Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence
 dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands
 manually, which can be
 counter-productive and -intuitive.

 If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
 colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and
 where you want certain features
 (transparency, density, kink  frizz) to change and over which
 distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and feet,
 as well as nose  eye lids.
 So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure
 your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you
 have in mind.

 Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly
 work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style, even if your
 source and target emitter
 topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce details
 in the fur that got lost.

 If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the
 emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot
 collide with its own emitter, so you
 have to duplicate the source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is,
 create more actual polygons) and use that as the collision object. That
 would still be acceptable, if it
 worked, which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that
 any collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent
 of what you have it collide with
 (itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I
 ran into for which I could not find a solution. Thankfully my fur was
 rather short and the character had a
 lot of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides some problems
 when bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation in my
 case). From what I can tell it looks
 like collision is always computed against a

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Stefan Kubicek

I've never used Yeti but I've heard good things about it, making it the
topmost solution on my list of things to check out in the future.
I'd also go for that if you are familiar with Maya and don't live in the
US (copy/paste from their website: Please note: Due to circumstances
outside of our control, we are unable to sell Yeti to customers located in
the US). But I won't start another Joe Alter bashing thread here...

Especially the dynamics is where Maya seems the provide the longest list
of options (nHair, Yeti,...), and that's really crucial for longer hair.

Some thoughts on rendering: Most renderers handle hair quite well, unless
it needs to be transparent,
which it almost always needs to be (usually a gradient with increasing
transparency from root to tip) to make the hair look softer. Without it it
just looks really brushy and thick. Ok for short, thick hair like on a
tigers nose and beard stubbles, but not the fluffy stuff on hamsters or
human heads even. Making the hair very thin towards the end is an
alternative, but usually requires to bump up the AA samples, with the
usual render time hit that goes hand in hand with.
From all renderers I tried (Arnold, Vray, 3Delight, mentalray), 3Delight
was the only one that deilvered decent performance, especially in
combination with motion blur, and has, imho, the single most beautiful
hair shading I've seen, including handling GI very well. All others grind
to a halt in such cases in comparison, with Vray being extremely slow in
both rendering and export of hair strands , Arnold having the shortest
TTFP (time to first pixel) with very fast export, and 3Delight being in
the middle between the two in terms of export times and TTFP, but fastest
in rendering overall (by leaps and bounds).
It does require a bit more fiddling with lights (deep shadow maps) to get
that slight translucent effect on back- and rimlights. See this thread:
http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=24t=1275start=20

I was longing for redshift too, but it became clear shortly before I went
into the project that it would not be ready in time for hair rendering. A
version supporting strands was just released yesterday, but there is no
hair shader yet afaik.

Good luck, and thanks for the links, some where news to me.

Stefan

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage

from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects

there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something
actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might
find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence
dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands
manually, which can be

counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be
and where you want certain features
(transparency, density, kink frizz) to change and over which
distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and
feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Sebastien Sterling

Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth porting too
:) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.


On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say its
 pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people acclimatise to
 it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is ironically, it
 doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for Arnold or vray
 renderman...

 A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of a
 Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

 Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti integration
 for rendering preview which may be available in a later version but at this
 time we're not planning an XSI version of the editing tools.  Adding in
 support for a whole new 3D application is a large task and we haven't had
 enough demand for an XSI version at this stage.  If at some point that
 changes and it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of licenses
 we could afford to do this.

 We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

 All the best,
 Colin



 On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

 Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
 one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
 another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
 sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

 (Thread) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

 (Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/
 994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


 Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
 hair-farm into Softimage
 from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
 That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

 http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

 For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
 beautiful shed projects
 there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

 http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-
 and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

 --

 I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find
 something
 that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
 approach when
 applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
 Maya/Max/Softimage.

 The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
 seems it´ll be
 easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something
 actually looking
 good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might
 find atractive
 at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time
 doodling.

 I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be
 Maya.

 I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
 compensate that sad fact.

 Cheers,

 tim








 On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

 Hi Tim,

 I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
 hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

 A few tips about working with built-in hair:

 Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence
 dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands
 manually, which can be
 counter-productive and -intuitive.

 If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
 colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and
 where you want certain features
 (transparency, density, kink  frizz) to change and over which
 distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and feet,
 as well as nose  eye lids.
 So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure
 your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you
 have in mind.

 Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly
 work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style, even if your
 source and target emitter
 topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce details
 in the fur that got lost.

 If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the
 emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot
 collide with its own emitter, so you
 have to duplicate the source mesh and subdivide it for real (that is,
 create more actual polygons) and use that as the collision object. That
 would still be acceptable, if it
 worked, which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that
 any collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent
 of what you have it collide with
 (itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks and is the biggest problem I
 ran into for which I could not find a solution.

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Tim Leydecker


this hairbusiness is a minefield.

i don´t have a arnold renderman or vray license running on my machine at the 
moment.
I actually took yeti - mR support for granted... crap


In terms of creating/styling hair, the sheep example from Rune Spaans as well as
the other tutorials here make hairfarm look desireable and artist friendly:

www.hair-farm.com/tutorials/

Especially because of it´s volume filling option (something that was also shown
in a demo of fabric engine).

That seems to be something very desireable, as creating a proxy volume instead 
of painfully
creating guide curves and brushing/clipping/forcing things around them in place 
gives a better
feedback while designing a hairdo imo.

The yeti docs for 1.3 i´ve found via google seem comprehensive and include a 
lot of sample files
but I haven´t asked for the trialyet, trying to time my use to having at least 
3-4 days toplay with it.


But that´s all still theoretical in my case. The only option I´ve tried and 
discard is the Fibermesh approach,
for me, that´s to fiddly to get used to it but maybe i just approached it 
without the proper mindset.

Thanks again for sharing your insights!


tim













On 08.02.2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling wrote:

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say its pretty 
revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people acclimatise to it in a 
matter of weeks, the
only drawback i can see is ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, 
obliging you to go for Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of a 
Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti integration for 
rendering preview which may be available in a later version but at this time we're 
not planning an XSI
version of the editing tools.  Adding in support for a whole new 3D application 
is a large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at this 
stage.  If at some point
that changes and it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of 
licenses we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin



On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de 
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here:

(Thread) https://groups.google.com/__forum/#!topic/xsi_list/__2erKqUcghpI 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI


(Image)https://groups.google.__com/group/xsi_list/attach/__994086131ca9460/bear_still.__jpg?part=4view=1

https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1


Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax) 
hair-farm into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-__hair-into-softimage/ 
http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those 
beautiful shed projects
there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks


http://lesterbanks.com/2013/__05/workflow-tips-for-creating-__and-grooming-hair-in-__softimage/

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

--

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find 
something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading 
approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it seems 
it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something 
actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might 
find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time 
doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t 
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim








On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in 
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence 
dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands manually, 
which can be
counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair

Re: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread olivier jeannel

How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache ?
Alembic ? Ass ?

Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

Olivier

Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :
Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth
porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com mailto:sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com
wrote:

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to
say its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen
people acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i
can see is ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray,
obliging you to go for Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility
of a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
integration for rendering preview which may be available in a
later version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version
of the editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D
application is a large task and we haven't had enough demand for
an XSI version at this stage. If at some point that changes and
it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of licenses we
could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin

On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de
mailto:bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial
of Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s
name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar
thread here:

(Thread)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing
(3dsMax) hair-farm into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in
those beautiful shed projects
there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and
need to find something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair
shading approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well
and it seems it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to
something actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing
options I might find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya,
it´ll be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin
can´t compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the
built-in hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every
vertex, hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and
lots of guide hair strands manually, which can be
counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis
(via vertex colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly
you want your hair to be and where you want certain features
(transparency, density, kink frizz) to change and over
which distance/area. This is especially important for
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you
better make sure your topology works not only for
animation but also for the hair setup you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer

Re[2]: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Artur Woźniak

Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti.
Textures were applied then in Xsi.

Artur

-- Wiadomość oryginalna --
Od: olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr
Do: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache ?
Alembic ? Ass ?

Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

Olivier

On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling
sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote:
Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say
its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people
acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see
is ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go
for Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of
a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later
version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the
editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a
large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at
this stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio
may commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin

On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker bauero...@gmx.de wrote:

Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
Yeti,

one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
here:

(Thread)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI

(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4view=1

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage

from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects

there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
find something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and
it seems it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to
something actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I
might find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:

Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be

counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via
vertex colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your
hair to be and where you want certain features
(transparency, density, kink frizz) to change and over which
distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and
feet, as well as nose eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the
hair setup you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair
style, even if your source and target emitter
topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce
details in the fur that got lost.

If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh
as the emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd
mesh cannot collide with its own emitter, so you
have to duplicate

Re: Re[2]: Softimage Hair options?

2014-02-08 Thread Mario Reitbauer

I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush with 
fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin 
(http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands) to softimage.
You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to finalize 
your hair grooming.


Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it comes 
to brushing your hair.
I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for brushing 
your guides before you add stuff on top)


cheers Mario



On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +, Artur Woźniak 
artur.w...@gmail.com wrote:

Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti.
Textures were applied then in Xsi.

Artur

-- Wiadomość oryginalna --
Od: olivier jeannel
Do:
Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26
Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options?

How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache
? Alembic ? Ass ?
Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ?

Olivier

Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit :

Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of
kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth
porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti.

On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling  wrote:

Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say
its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people
acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see 
is
ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go 
for

Arnold or vray renderman...

A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of
a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response.

Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti
integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later
version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the
editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a
large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at 
this

stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may
commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this.

We're glad you're enjoying Yeti!

All the best,
Colin

On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker  wrote:
 Thanks for this in-depth answer!

Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of
Yeti,
one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from
another maya maling list and another because of the really nice
sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread
here:

(Thread)

(Image)

Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax)
hair-farm into Softimage
from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron.
That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome.

For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those
beautiful shed projects
there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks

--

I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to
find something
that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading
approach when
applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either
Maya/Max/Softimage.

The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it
seems it´ll be
easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to
something actually looking
good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I
might find atractive
at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond
spare-time doodling.

I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll
be Maya.

I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t
compensate that sad fact.

Cheers,

tim

On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
 Hi Tim,

I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hairfur of Softimage /2014SP2).

A few tips about working with built-in hair:

Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex,
hence dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair
strands manually, which can be
counter-productive and -intuitive.

If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to 
be

and where you want certain features
(transparency, density, kink  frizz) to change and over which
distance/area. This is especially important for areas like hand and
feet, as well as nose  eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make
sure your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair
setup you have in mind.

Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does
mostly work but has a tendency to blur the transferred hair style,
even if your source and target emitter
topology are the same. You need to move in again and reintroduce
details in the fur that got lost.

If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use

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