No, what I am saying is the modeling core needs an adjustment, and that adjustment when implemented can be inherited by other systems such as paint. Until that adjustment is made, many efforts to integrate solutions are limited or not possible.
Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 11:03 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 So what your saying Matt, is that a brush system would have to be built from the ground up, as its own independent operation set, that such a feature would involve considerable reworking of the SI core, something that only AD can really do, not something achievable and sustainable by isolated devs, in other words its up to AD... Thanks for taking the time to be thorough, its good to know that despite what dreamworks would have us believe, Santa Claus is well and truly dead. On 27 March 2013 00:56, Matt Lind <ml...@carbinestudios.com<mailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com>> wrote: The issue with Softimage is the pieces are there, but don't play together nice enough. The tools were adequate in the day years ago. Production has evolved quite a bit since then but the Softimage modeling core has not. Many of the tools I need to create for our artists cannot be done in the Softimage API due to lack of a developed core for things like being able to preserve textures and materials (clusters) when updating topology, or being able to control where operators appear in the construction history. Example 1: Mirror plane. This is a tool from 3DSMax where the user is given an implicit plane and can place it to slice a mesh and have it symmetrized across the plane. Softimage can do this much with the slice operator and symmetrize operator. BUT the 3DSMax version has the ability to continually read user input to update the mesh further (eg. Push/pull point positions on the original mesh and have the symmetrized half update in real time). Basically it's symmetrical modeling across a user defined plane of symmetry. The user can add as many planes as desired to build up organic geometry very, very quickly. Softimage's modeling architecture is limited and cannot read further user input because it occurs higher on the construction history than the symmetry and slice operators. There is also no way to force those operators higher on the stack as they're bound to the modelling marker. Softimage cannot support multiple planes either or else instability results. Example 2: Preserve UVs I'm always pounded for this one. It's a tool which allows users to manipulate vertices in the 3D viewports while preserving the Texture UVs as they're moved. Eg. When a vertex is translated in one direction, the UVs associated with that vertex are pushed in the opposite direction to allow the vertex to 'swim' through the projection. Softimage has a 'swim' feature, but only for implicit projections which is useless in a games development pipeline as 99% of all assets use explicit UV projections. Again, like with the mirror plane, Softimage is limited by how it's construction history is organized to read further input from the user once the operator is applied. Example 3: Locking topology In a games development environment, assets are usually created piecemeal. A character isn't a solid seamless mesh. The customizable features presented to the customer are often built as separate objects, but these objects must assemble together to appear like a seamless mesh. This means any work to the vertex placement or sample data such as user normal, vertex colors, and texture UVs must be locked down along the seams to prevent artists from accidentally making modifications to these portions of the mesh. Softimage provides no ability to do this. The best option on the table is an ICE operator placed at the very top of the construction history to lock the user specified vertices. However, this falls short in that if the user clicks the 'freeze' button, the operator will be frozen and removed from construction history. Again, limitation of the core architecture. Example 4: Paint. The paint tools in Softimage are lacking. They were designed for painting weight maps to alter envelope weights and deformers - that's it. The paint brush for vertex colors is just an extension of that and not very robust. There is no color palette available to load/save colors to use in other scenes, or even the current scene beyond the palette borrowed from windows. There is no ability to compare colors side-by-side on adjacent polygons without having to dig into user preferences to turn off selection highlights, then turn it on again when you're done with your comparison. Very clunky. There are no tools available to modify topology via paint. The best option available is pushing points via the push operator which is, back to the beginning, a weight map tool. We need more than deformations. We need a paint tool that can destructively edit the mesh by adding vertices, edges, polygons, and samples. We need the adjustments for the brush to be informative and customizable to accommodate modeler's needs. Falloff options, brush tip shapes, intensity controls other than simple hardness applied uniformly, angular attenuation, operator assignments, and so on. A 'push' tool has been around forever, where is the accompanying 'pinch' tool? Max and Maya are far in the lead in this area. Softimage's paint tool qualifies technically as a paint brush, but it's not a painter's tool. It's designed more for somebody who does other things and needs an interface to quickly do a few short tasks rather than tagging points manually with rectangular selections all the time. Again, production has since evolved quite a bit. It's about time the tools do too. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 3:53 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 >>>EricT, Yes i know, they flat out say so in the intro "building on NEX" i >>>don't approve of just buying up third party plugins and highlighting them as >>>core features, more so with free where like "Grease Pencil" i wonder if Mr >>>mootz ever gets love letters from AD hounding him for his Em series >>>Andreas and Raffaele, it's not about the grass being greener, i recently had >>>to fight really hard for the right to use softimage in the company i'm >>>currently working for, no one should have to do that. also i think you are >>>forgetting maya's god awful hit detection when selecting, as well as the >>>unintuitive UI hogging abomination which is the "tool settings panel". When it comes to modelling the thing i like most about SI is how clean and stream line it is, how few things come between user and creative process. So now i don't want to leave softimage ( i only just got here) i want innovation and new things to come to it. >>>Matt L, i'm not a dev, but its all there the deformers the brush the maps, >>>none of these things need to be built, surely they can be hooked together >>>somehow, i believe someone tried back in the day on rRay, only it seemed to >>>be exclusive for 32bit... On 26 March 2013 22:52, Jason S <jasonsta...@gmail.com<mailto:jasonsta...@gmail.com>> wrote: That's what I was gonna say.. remains to be seen if that would remain true in the real world.. On 26/03/2013 5:47 PM, Sebastien Sterling wrote: http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-maya/features This update (Accelerated modelling tool set) pretty much seems to obliterate any advantage Softimage has over maya modeling wise
