Looks Amazing!
Can't believe you've been working on just this since Barnyard!!! It shows.
Congratulations!
On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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
<http://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 2^nd 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 3^rd . 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
