Re: A few Softimage Questions

[Sylvain Lebeau]

Hi Daniel!!! First of all Welcome to this marvelous list!!! alot of key people in the industry are here!!... knowledge is shared all day long. You wont feel alone in the dark here for sure. Second: Softimage is the most intuitive 3D software around. Of course it is insane at rigging/character animation...But i must say that it's modeling tools, render passes, partions and overrides is by far the best too. Not to mention the render tree and ICE. And it also it supports Arnold and but also Vray if your goal is to use it. Also it got a nice viewcube!!! amazing! (the most anoying thing when you want to do a render Region in a viewport) .......disabled.....done. It's been almost 15 years i didnt touch Max...so i cant tell how much it evolved much..  but i can assure you that the render passes system in Soft is crazy cool. Maybe it should be a checking point for you before deciding to render from Max..  But you seem's already confortable with Max for your I/O wih houdini and all.... So.. up to you to test it! What are you using for data passing between Houdini and Max? .... Alembic? We dont use Facerobot here. We did some tests and it wasnt meant for our needs but maybe it will be more suitable for you with your mocap needs and workflow. third: best of luck for your project!! sly -- Sylvain Lebeau // SHED V-P/Visual effects supervisor 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM>   Daniel Dye Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:41 PM Hi all, First time posting on this mailing list. I'm a student who will be diving into my first animated short and I am trying to establish my pipeline. I'm primarily a VFX guy and as such this will be relatively new ground for me. I primarily use a combination of 3ds Max and Houdini for my VFX work. I have been looking towards Softimage for the animation side of my project. The inclusion of FaceRobot is very appealing, and something I would love to put into practice. I will be using iPiSoft for body motion capture and I'm tossing up between Zigntrack or Syntheyes (already own) for facial motion capture. The facial motion capture is where I feel FaceRobot would excel. I'm curious about the general rigging, animation layering and mocap retargeting avaliable in Softimage for body animation. Because I want to utilize FaceRobot, I assume it would be an easier workflow to also animate the body in Softimage. The animation will then be brought back to 3ds Max and combined with assests from Houdini for final rendering with Vray. I understand being the Softimage Mailing List, opinions may be biased :P Just curious if anyone knows of any pros/cons or issues I may run into? Thank you in advanced for any help, Cheers, Daniel Dye.