It's not about whether we can freeze a texture projection or not. The issue is about the Softimage API and it's limitations to do things we need to do to be really productive.
There are areas which are not developed in line with our needs, and in some cases are blocking issues. Texture operator freezing was just one of them as you cannot effectively model and texture at the same time because freezing modeling construction history also freezes texture operators, but the relationships is not clear to the user. Once a texture operator is frozen, you lose certain abilities such as the 'preserve UVs' workflow. This effectively forces users to complete all modeling before beginning to texture. This is not realistic because in the case of games development the process is heavily iterative. Just because an asset is modeled and textured then sent into the game engine does not imply the asset needs no further work. In fact, it's just the opposite as the real work has just begun. Once an asset gets into a game engine, a whole other level of workflow enters the picture from game play, performance balancing, art direction, beta testing, market research, and so on. Assets on average go through at least 15-20 revisions before deemed 'approved'. That means an artist performing revisions is beginning with an asset that is completed with geometry and texture, but no construction history or texture operators present in the scene. The problem is the artist needs to make the same edits to textures as they would as if creating the textures from scratch - including preserve UVs, regularize, relax, unfold, and other common operations. This is the block as many of the functions aren't available once texture operators are frozen. You have to redo your work from scratch to get into an edit friendly position to continue the edit process which is prohibitively expensive in time and energy. The fact a software developer who claims to understand our market continues to push out workflows like this is rather frustrating. When project Moondust was first revealed, it was a very exciting moment because it hinted at the potential to remove many of the barriers we experience in production. While it certainly gave Softimage instant legitimacy in the area of Particle work, it didn't provide the same impact to other areas of the software, in many cases only retreading established ground, or not supporting as much as established systems. Modeling comes to mind. While topology generators are unique to ICE and not available in the C++ SDK, the rest of the ICE modeling system only supports a subset provided by the C++ SDK. This makes it very difficult to make custom tools because our assets are loaded with custom properties and metadata which are the main mechanisms to pass information from Softimage to our game engine. ICE doesn't support custom properties or metadata or cluster properties in many operations such as merging or copying which basically makes them off limits for production as using an ICE modeling tool would destroy data we need to maintain. From our perspective, it's as if ICE modeling doesn't exist. We'd prefer it be an option in our pipeline, but to make that a reality, systems need to be completed and barriers removed. It's a design issue. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Simon Reeves Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 4:15 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 Diving in a bit here so apologies if I missed it, but you can freeze uv's and keep the projection, and unfreeze it at any time. There's a little 'freeze' button in one of the texture properties somewhere. Ill look where it is exactly when I'm infront of soft Simon Reeves VFX Artist London, UK On 29 Mar 2013, at 06:42, Szabolcs Matefy <szabol...@crytek.com<mailto:szabol...@crytek.com>> wrote: Shit hits the fan, when you want to to have sculpt like deformation in XSI. Unfortunately the current system doesn't let you build up your strokes properly, due to the weightmap limitation. What I think, that each "stroke" should have its own weight map, but that would slaughter the performance. The graphite toolset has quite nice things, but our max artist hate it, it's nowhere close to the original polyboost feature set. Maybe, texture should have its own history stack? And an additional Freeze T button to freeze texturing only? Anyway, while a texture operator is live, I'd sometimes have it sit on the top of the stack, so the Texture History is a good idea. I tried to recreate for example, the DPK Paint Deform (http://dpk.stargrav.com/pafiledb/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=32) with ICE, and more or less succeeded. Unfortunately the buildup is missing (when your strokes are accumulating, causing the increased effect. Maya's artisan treats it pretty well. And since I do all of my modeling with my Wacom pen, I'd be happy with a proper sculpting tool. And not to mention, the ability to disable the weightmap display during sculpting...Seeing the model in constant shading with the weight map is not really help in deformation. My 2 cents Szabolcs From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 12:31 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Subject: Re: Softimage 2014 I agree with matt, if only to add a new tab like m freeze, but which would preserve texture, the tool you are talking about in max is called paint deformation, and it is at the bottom of the edit poly operation menu, you can push pull relax, its basically like artisan in maya. On 28 March 2013 23:08, Matt Lind <ml...@carbinestudios.com<mailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com>> wrote: 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: 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 Ahmidou Lyazidi Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:32 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> 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
