You wrote all that on your phone? :)
On 3/15/2014 1:31 PM, Bradley Gabe wrote:
This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes
their DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.
It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of
the rest of the application.
Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going
into the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle
system (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to
multiprocesses). And despite the SI community's repeated insistence
ICE was far more important than that, a particle system is precisely
how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing continuing evidence that
Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't want to listen to
the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.
In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with
a highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly,
visual node based toolkit for discovering and developing production
workarounds, without having to resort to coding for every little
thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of the system.
It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more
profound understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of
how the linear algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence
operators to do the things I could only imagine in times past. Every
day in production is a day of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do
you have any idea how empowering that feels after years of waiting for
technical help from developers that never arrived?
Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with
ICE, my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation,
etc, had increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for
me to work out the math, I could develop in less than a day, because
ICE had both provided me with enough practice to greatly enhance my
thinking, but also because I could use it as a prototype laboratory to
quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to sitting down to
write out the code.
If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince
us the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list
of nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's
a fully developed, operator development kit, from which particles,
fluids, simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds,
workarounds, workarounds are possible!
-Bradley
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones <andy.jo...@gmail.com
<mailto:andy.jo...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau
<chris.vienn...@autodesk.com <mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and
compounds you all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
Nope
