Autodesk is doing a lot of development in the area of 3D scan data handling.
If you look into what is going on in the area of topology data aquisition for architecture, engineering and the military, there is a shift towards 3D pointcloud data which imho is compareable to what 2D tracking as a concept brought us in the 90s. (Facial recognition and finally image based modeling and camera positional data) It is at hand that the more complex, raw 3D point cloud data will need new and abstracted ways of handling and manipulation, filtering options and adaptive control layers for approximated data. The implication such data for 3D animation brings is that the concept of wheighting a fixed number of vertices to a bone may have to be extended beyond a fixed number of polygons. Unfortunately, taking fall-off based volume wheighting as in it´s current level of finesse may give worse results than before, especially if your shape options for the influence volume are limited to capsules, boxes or spheres. I am a bit worried that the process of rigging&wheighting an organic character will become even more frustrating and stiff or at least will need even more steps, like creating an extra controlsurface with a fixed number of points and wrapping it around the high-density data. Such a wrap-deformer takes away control. It´s always the rims and little caveats that need extra care. Cheers, tim On 09.01.2014 02:13, Guillaume Laforge wrote:
On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:55 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: In the new future ( not talking about autodesk here) I think workflows will standards will be Gator-like tools to deal with topo changes (point clouds tools as necessary also ptex-based workflows) and katana-like proceduralism for render passes-like workflow. I'm still wondering if a company ( not talking about Autodesk here ) will do anything new like that for our little world. Money for such large dev projects is just not in the animation/vfx world anymore. I'm not sarcastic, just realist. So lets embrace old techs like Maya or XSI. They won't evolve too much but won't disappear before many (many) years. Btw, Katana is not the futur, it is now :).
