Just to tack on... Coming from UE3 and Unity, I can safely say that building engine dependent tools\editors into a DCC is decidedly not the way to go. If you can avoid it at all costs, I would highly recommend that.
It's a slippery slope. You realize that most of the infrastructure you want is already in a DCC so it makes sense to use that as a base...months and years later you realize that was not a good decision. :) And now... My mantra over the last several years has been...the DCC is just that, it creates digital content. Everything else is done in engine\editor. Materials, post FX, physics, VFX, Fluids, lighting, animation sequencing, cameras, terrain generation, scene assembly and so on should only ever be done in your engine and editor. And I got there from having tried to build the DCC into our editors. Both with Soft and with Maya. Both were the wrong choice. My team of nearly 50+ environment artists live a daily struggle because we made that choice. _______________________________________________________________________________ Marc Brinkley 343 Industries Microsoft Studios marc.brinkley [at] microsoft.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matt Lind Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Survey - how would you do this? I cannot reveal what our plans are, but I can say what we need is an environment that has an open and deep SDK to allow us to build tools on our terms, and not on the application's terms, so we can make our own infrastructure without having to re-invent the wheel and reduce risk from pipeline changes/regressions from commercial software. Allows us to define our own primitives, data structures, and treats those data structures as first class citizens in the API. Not have licensing which ties the content creation product into our released product, and is very cost effective for very large teams working across multiple sites. Can be set up quickly and easily and is a light install, and not require engineers to make usable or explain to artists. In concept, Fabric engine most closely fits that paradigm, but it needs to mature before we can give it a serious look. I would not be surprised if we develop our own tools a la Pixar or the other mainstays of the industry. The trend in this space is to build your creation tools into your engine so you can take advantage of real time feedback from iteration (a la Valve). Since we built our own engine from scratch, we have full control to implement such features on our terms. Max, Maya, and Softimage don't cater to the MMORPG space very well. You can use the products, as many have obviously demonstrated over the years, but it's very much shaving the corners of the square peg to fit it into the round hole. This has been a classic problem in games for a long time as the commercial software largely cater to film/video and assume games is a simpler version of that paradigm. In the early days of games that was a band-aid that worked, but games have evolved a lot since then making the current 3D software not so relevant anymore. The difference with an MMORPG is the game has larger scope, compared to a console or mobile game, and therefore must pull back on nifty art features and think more big picture of the gameplay as network bandwidth is an issue, and there is a very wide variety of hardware out there that must be accounted for - unlike a console where a particular platform is known in advance and likely not to change (much). Majority of our anticipated customers still use older hardware running Windows XP, for example. We have to make content which caters to that lowest denomination. As tools move forward to accommodate those working on feats like Elysium, they tend to forget and leave behind those who still need that micro-architecture edit capability like us where pixels are still pushed one by one. There is a reason why many games don't have interesting artwork - the tools get in the way. Matt -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 2:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Survey - how would you do this? On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 2:31 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]> wrote: > To work around many of the issues, artists migrated to other software > such as Modo, Z-brush, and so on, further fracturing our pipeline > where work takes place, and reducing our needs to write tools in Softimage > for art manipulation where ICE can be a meaningful contributor. [...] > The bottom line is ICE is not tailored to our needs and is of very limited > use/benefit. [...] > Our primary needs are data translation (import/export), database > communications, texture unfolding/UV manipulation, modeling tools such > as re-topology and polygon reduction, hardware (real time) shading -- > All of which Softimage doesn't do very well So.... do you have a plan to diminish your dependency on Softimage? what is it, what's next?
