I think the 'age of the platform' assessment will be restricted to film/video as I see a fork in the road developing between games and film/video pipelines. Actually, it's already been happening for many years.
Traditionally games have borrowed film/video tools for 3D work because needs were simple and the film/video tools could be bent to service. But now as graphics hardware improves, games requirements are much more demanding and divergent from that which film/video caters. Film/video has always moved towards larger and larger datasets requiring subdivision of labor to the N'th degree. Quality was the overriding factor. If it takes N hours to render that one awe inspiring frame, you do it. That growth requires asset management to manage all the facilities and assets. The assets last only as long as the production, unless there is a sequel. Each production typically involves reworking and re-inventing the wheel unless you work at one of the older mainstays that have significant R+D investment into their pipelines. Basically assets are generated, a picture is taken of them, then they are dumped into a box where they sit on a virtual shelf until needed again. Kind of like the old gag on Popeye cartoons where they chop down the redwoods, send them to the saw mill, then whittle it down to a single toothpick where it's shipped off in a box. In games, it's a bit different. In the case of the MMO I'm working on the assets must have a very long shelf life - measured in decades. The assets contribute to live software environments, must be very optimal, and are under constant iteration. While growth is also occurring in the games pipeline, it's moving in a different direction than film/video. Games is moving fast towards 'in context' editing of assets, as in, creating/editing the assets in the live game environment. To accomplish the feat requires being very tightly bound to the runtime environment of the game engine. Therefore a DCC application which serves as a 'platform' will not serve any role where the work is done in the game environment. I would venture to say that many games developers are actively pursuing the route of removing DCC applications from their pipelines completely. It will be many years before it is actually accomplished, however. I remember a discussion with former Softimage PM Gareth Morgan back in the late 1990s where he said they were actively working to make 'sumatra' a game engine with DCC tools. That vision is not far off from reality. The only part he got wrong is the DCC application isn't the host, it's the guest. What you'll see emerge in the games development arena for content creation are application(s) which can attach live agents to the content being created so it can be merged into the game environment. In other words, something a game engine can host. The difficulty comes in the area of viewing the work. Something like Fabric Engine has its own language for compiling and preparing the assets for display. This is the exact same responsibility of the game engine. While the DCC application clearly isn't a solution here, the Fabric Engine model isn't a hands-down winner either (but much closer to the correct solution). It'll be interesting to see how that problem is addressed. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane Sent: Monday, August 05, 2013 9:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Yost Group - related to the Naiad/SIGGRAPH discussion Why Fanboi, and why conspiracy? I consider Paul and Co. to be smart enough to know that that is EXACTLY what they should be shooting for. AD knows it themselves IMO, as does SideFX, and the Foundry, and many others. The writing couldn't be plainer on all walls that the industry is shifting again. >From blackboxed, fragmented specialistic apps in the end80s to mid nineties, >to the rise of the artist friendly monolith in the end 90s, to the monolithic >but moderately open app from end-90s until now, we're now moving fast towards >a common stream of OSS standards which will be injected into by various small >footprint, very specialized and tailored apps (ZB, Mari, Katana etc.), and >have a layer floating on top to interface pipe and content/operation >management on top of that will be platform centric. You have pointed out bits of that youreself. Maya and Soft are more and more used as mere scene assembly and animation platforms. That type of approach is becoming more widely available by the minute to smaller and smaller entities, even to individuals. It's only the middle end caught into hard software locks at this point. The age of the platform is coming. Everybody already manages shots with shotgun, assets with tank (or perforce, or propietary, or what else you have it), models with ZB, retopos with 3DC or Topogun, textures with mudbox or mari, does effects in Houdini, or Realflow, hair is left to plugins (shave, yeti), lights with katana, renders with PRMan, composites with Nuke, finals with DaVinci... Who caches with something other Alembic (or propietary formats) or writes images other than EXR? All UIs are Qt, threading is beind coalesced in fewer solutions by the day, libraries emerge to abstract and generalise many things (OCL, Thrust etc.). What little is left out has initiatives that might be caught up on (OSL, partIO, openVDB), or will one day see an alternative that will become the standard. What's left for Maya or Soft to do but assemblying assets and rig/animation? Which are ultimately just scene Management tasks, a specialized type of graph which, of the lot, is the most backwards and dated of all sections of the pipe. There will be churn, as always for a few years one sub-field using CGI is left better or worse serviced than others, one size more or less competitive, but I don't think there will be a next-gen big app, not one as big (proportionally) as Soft was, or Maya is. Fabric did the right thing, all they have to do is garner the attention and sustenance to punch through the industry catching up to the obvious through lean years. On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: And to throw some fanboi conspiracy theory gas into the flames: If you integrate with all the DCC apps, you've essentially built up the trust with all the user bases and have the ability to suck them into your DCC of the future to reduce any and all risk of switching a production pipeline to another base application. At least give us a ray of hope, Paul. ;-) Matt
