*long slow clap*
That was great; I just saw your game promoted by a number of online magazines
and news hubs via facebook; and it is great to see the minds, the talent and
the software behind it - knowing full well how much work and love went into it,
and it’s great to see how good the tool was to get the job done. Impressive,
and always amazing to see such a huge project come to a finish, and learning
how it was built, a true marvel! Encouraging, yet.. sadly.. mellow concerning
the “tool”.. I agree with you fully right at your closing statements. 😉
-Draise
Ph: +57 313 811 6821
From: Matt Lind
Sent: Tuesday, June 3, 2014 21:01
To: [email protected]
I don’t get to say this often, but I’ve finished a project using Softimage
which all can see. Well, it’s not actually ‘finished’ as it’s an online game
which is continuously maintained, updated, and ongoing, but it’s now live and I
can talk about it beyond generalizations. Yay! My last completed project was
my previous production –Barnyard the animated feature back in 2006. It’s been
a long time coming, a relief, and refreshing to be able to refer to something I
did in the current decade.
Wildstar officially launched last Friday night at midnight for early access,
but opened up the flood gates today for everybody else. The game is now
running smoothly in North America and Europe for all to see and experience. If
you were part of the beta, let it be known significant improvements have been
made since on all fronts. If you haven’t tried the game yet, point your
browser to www.wildstar-online.com and click on the shiny buttons. The first
30 days are free with initial purchase.
Production started in 2005 using Softimage XSI v3.5 and launched with Softimage
2013 SP1 – all of it in 32 bit land. Majority of the content created in
Softimage 7.5 which we used for roughly 5 years. Softimage was used for a
heavy majority of the 3D artwork including characters, props, environments
(other than the ground), buildings, dungeons, and everything inside of them.
We didn’t use ICE at all (but not for lack of trying, and we tested heavily),
so this is a good example of what the fundamental toolset can do. Heavy use of
custom properties, vertex colors, user normals, clusters, envelopes, UV spaces,
and hardware (real time) shaders to customize and iterate on our content. What
made these simple components really nice is they were general and could be
re-targeted for many uses outside of their original intended purpose. Our
particles were created and applied in Softimage, but simulated only in engine.
The SDK was used to write 500+ tools to assist artists to create their content
include tools like ‘mimick’ which is a command similar to GATOR which can
transfer attributes, but do so on select subcomponents instead of the entire
object, along with other bells and whistles. Often overlooked and
understated, but Softimage scaling was incredibly powerful for controlling the
squash and stretch scaling of deformers used in our envelopes to animate
characters with cartoon whimsy and without ugly shearing often associated with
other software. It is used on every asset that moves. Relational views were
used to create tools such as a face editor to view and animate faces for our
player characters, and adjust face customizations to see how they’d appear in
the game as each of our characters have multiple faces and other components
which can plug in like a Mr. Potato head doll. It was important to see the
various components in context side-by-side for comparison while creating the
content so consistency could be maintained. This was achieved using many
‘object view’ embedded into the relational view. Under the hood the face
editor drove the animation mixer to perform face pose blending so artists could
see the animation in real time on their characters. Also, NURBS, that’s right,
NURBS surfaces were used to transfer face poses and clothing between
characters. The details must remain a trade secret, but I just had to mention
we used NURBS in all their unfinished glory to get meaningful work done with
significant contributions to the end product. Render passes were used to
re-dress environments to allow artists to create geometry once, then swap
textures, shader settings, and other details many times for each variant of the
environment. Not only does it simplify the artist workflow by centralizing all
their interaction to a few clicks, but it also allows assets to be packed into
compact files for use in our engine. Render passes are used in housing and
dungeons. If we had to do this in Maya, we’d probably have to break up each
variant into its own scene and have to figure out a way to merge all the scenes
together that shared the same geometry. These polished touches matter.
Softimage for the win.
So that said, while many 3D software could create the assets in their own time
and space vacuum, Softimage (in my opinion) was the only software that could’ve
tackled this project given our specific time, resources, and budget as there
were many close calls along the way. I say Softimage because many of the
aforementioned features came out of the box with us ready to roll and not have
to spend oodles of time reinventing the wheel. Not having to write an
animation mixer to do face pose blending, or render pass systems to do
texture/shader swaps were incredible time savers and something we could lean
on. Spreadsheet queries and custom selection filters allowed us to quickly and
easily find our custom data in any scene with just a click, view the data in a
clean environment, and change it in bulk, if necessary without worry of missing
a spot – highly important for finding and fixing bugs. The elegant user
experience was paramount to getting work done on tight schedules at high
quality with minimal development resources available. Everybody says that, but
in our case it couldn’t be more true. That user experience extends to the SDK
as well. Not having to relearn or rewrite code over many versions and upgrades
over the span of nearly a decade was quite important in maintaining continuity
and stability. The scripting object model was more than a blessing to get
under the hood and target only what we needed rather than having to rely on
combinations of commands which do more work than necessary or don’t do exactly
what we need as is available in most other 3D software. Backward compatibility
with the API for C++ development was very important too. While today’s
OpenGL/DirectX viewport may seem antiquated, at the time this project started
it was ahead of and more capable than any other in the industry, and fully
compatible with all the other tools such as render passes. That cannot be
overlooked.
Finally, I should thank all the hard work and contributions from the Softimage
developers and support, past and present, who put such an application together
to make it possible. Not just the foresight to see and understand the artist’s
point of view, but also in the continued listening and support when we needed
help along the way whether it be to fix bugs, augment existing features, or
implement new features to accommodate our needs. Building such an application
is more than just writing and compiling code – it’s about understanding people.
You cannot understand people without forming relationships and maintaining
those relationships over the long haul. Softimage made the effort to establish
and maintain those relationships contributing help and advice along the way,
and that is why so many successful projects have resulted. As much as I’ve
ragged on many points, the bigger picture is not lost on the fact Softimage is
a very capable and strong swiss army knife of 3D software to tackle many
projects fearlessly. It’s just a shame that in all my years of working with
Softimage|XSI, this is only the 2nd long form project I’ve been able to call
complete (due to project durations) and will be a shame that there will likely
not be a 3rd. One point of satisfaction is of having worked on one of the
first XSI projects in ‘Panic Room’, and now finishing one of the last in
‘Wildstar’. Both poetically apropos as Panic Room was a project fighting with
a then beta-quality release rushed to market full of many bugs while Wildstar
is a game about exploring and settling the planet Nexus much like the old west
of America’s pioneer days of the 1800’s with wagons, staking claims to
territory, gold rushes, and shootouts. Only fitting as I must now look forward
to a new destiny in uncharted territory as Softimage has literally been part of
half my life in the 21 years I’ve used both Softimage|3D and
Softimage|XSI….(and Eddie too!).
Thank you, Softimage.
Matt
