I think the point is that many of these features are not readily available out of the box. We have to write the tools ourselves and there are many blockades to getting the job done.
I have the ICE compound Guillame LaForge sent out last year, but it's a bit hit and miss. We're not supporting ICE in our pipeline yet due to instability when using ICE on reference models. 80% of our content is referenced models. I cannot let ICE compounds run amok in scenes that become referenced models and are reused in hundreds of other scenes. We don't have the bandwidth to manage such a situation. Paint - Softimage is light years behind everybody else. That is the point. Their animation-first mindset has been an obstacle to developing a pipeline as the parts we need most are modeling and texturing. Animation is nice, but it too lacks a lot of tools and workflows expected out of the box. Max does have tools to modify topology as our character artist showed me the tools a year or so ago spurring me to request the same from Softimage. They had the ability to pinch and pull, displace, as well as cut into the mesh almost like Zbrush. ZBrush was definitely more robust, but what Max offered was enough for what we needed to do. I'm not a Max user, so don't ask me the names of the tools. The best I can remember was something to do with a graphite toolset and the brush has the ability to have operators assigned to it so they could be painted on meshes. It was intuitive - something which softimage's paint workflow is anything but. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 Hi Matt, as you moved to 2013 lately, there might be workarounds for some of you problems. Preserve UVs: I think it's not publicly available, but piotrek did a swim UVs for explicit using the custom tool SDK, so it's doable. Paint: A Maya Artisan like paint tool is also possible, I have an unfinished one, it's only doing push and smooth, but working, I also never found the time to implement undo/redo. Also I'm not sure that maya and max have a brush to modify topology. Locking topology: Since 2012 there is a pin UVs that survive to freeze. I'm surprise that a all levels locked ICE tree can be freezed (bug?!), but you ca still make an operator that will lock a point and all it's attached properties. Locked operators are not freezable. Cheers ----------------------------------------------- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
