Stefan, re-reading my post, I'm not sure I was totally clear about modeling. I'm not sure if this puts us back in agreement or not, but to clarify, what I meant was just that most pipelines have a reasonable degree of choice in which package they use for modeling. I don't spend much time modeling personally so I'm not qualified to comment on the capabilities of the different packages. From what I do know I fully agree that losing XSI is a hit in this area. For me, it's a hit in every area, just due to how I can make use of ICE pretty much across the board. Not to mention the rest of the tools and the operator stack. I think part of why I glossed over modeling is that I think users who want to will be able to stick with XSI for modelling a little longer in that area than in, say, lighting, where things have to be more consistent across the studio.
I just re-read your first post as well and I misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and to which I agree: As far as modeling goes there is a broad range of options to go with (both commercial and non-commercial)
I would also say, I think my comments don't really at all capture the needs of game studios. We're all more alike than we are different, and I consider us one user community, but as far as my personal experience, I'm definitely coming at this from a primarily commercials/features point of view. Not sure if your a games guy or not, but I'm just realizing that's a broad category of people who are likely not as antsy as me about getting a new scene assembly tool :)
I used to be in games for several years. Most studios I've seen are running some sort of home-grown editor to assemble their game worlds, along the lines of the Cryteks Sandbox, Unity, etc..I doubt they would find a scene assembly tool geared towards shading/rendering useful out of the box, unless it was some emerging games company with awareness of what FE could bring to the game development table and the will to build on it with the goal to transform it into their game editing environment. As for FE used in games, I'm quite surprised seemingly nobody has picked that up yet.
I wonder how complicated it would be to get it to run on current consoles and even mobile devices.
Now I'm truly going on a tangent, but I would also imagine that a scene assembly tool that exports to Arnold would also serve as a good framework for collecting, prepping, optimizing, and exporting game assets :) You're basically exporting things to a "renderer" after all.
Like above, to a certain extent. It might be cool for texture baking/lighting, but the general tendency is to go real-time with as much of the lighting pipeline as possible - It's just so much more flexible and cheaper in the end, and I'm sure we'll see more of that happening in the near future (on faster hardware).
Here's a nice example of what's already possible: http://molecularmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/real-time-radiosity/#more-298
@Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement in any existing application out there.
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Stefan Kubicek
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keyvis digital imagery
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