For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in
2008.
GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing
rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use
out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data
between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped
up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition.
I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists
needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to
transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other
features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK
GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local
space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected
subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on.
However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as
a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly
related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose
transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical
envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters.
To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age
is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket
science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and
linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as
GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast,
accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a
pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared
to all the benefits it provides.
Matt
Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 17:10:52 -0500
From: Bradley Gabe <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: GATOR - A feature in Softimage since 2008
To: "[email protected]"
I can't claim credit for that idea coming from SI, only that GATOR made it
possible. I believe Houdini likely had an attribute transfer solution long
before XSI (if anyone would care to verify).
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Pierre Schiller <
[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you Bradley, for that acquintance. I thought Blender guys were the
ones who ideally found that method exploit, I?ve seen them in a lot of
their rigs
(low cage deformer aided by weights from bones, to drive more complex
bodies/facials)... I?m glad that came from softimage.
Not surprisingly all SI people on Japan is migrating to Blender....
