Many moons ago, I was demoing XSI to a certain very large Maya based games company (who shall remain nameless), there were a couple of guys in the room who were convinced that despite looking 'ok', GATOR wasn't anything that special. And that Maya could already do pretty much the same thing with an existing feature or a custom/modified tool.
They promptly spent the rest of the day (and evening) trying and failing to match the demo workflow. GATOR was always one of those features that would always grab an audiences attention. At an event last year, after the main agenga for sh*ts & giggles, I booted up Soft and did some demos. GATOR had people in shock. lol The only thing I found that had a similar 'wow' factor, was the transfer maps feature in Mudbox, that's actually very good. On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:48 AM Raffaele Fragapane < [email protected]> wrote: > GATOR might use that for the sampling, but I don't think those rely on > GATOR itself, or even if they did it'd be more of a logistical thing than > anything to do with what makes GATOR as good as it is (maybe there's an > acceleration structure or some sampling methods that under the hood were > implemented as part of GATOR and then used to service other parts of the > SDK). > > Soft has a vastly superior, to ANYTHING out there, notion and handling of > properties on meshes in general, even if, algorithmically speaking, Maya > was to get all the maths across tomorrow, it still wouldn't be a fraction > as powerful as the app in general, right now, is utterly lacking in > abstractions and representations of mesh data and using them for > deformation. > > On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Steven Caron <[email protected]> wrote: > >> All the GetClosest* functions on the geometry class? I would consider >> that part of the GATOR sdk >> >> *written with my thumbs >> On May 27, 2015 6:11 PM, "Luc-Eric Rousseau" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I >>> think. >>> I'm not aware of a Gator "sdk", what is that? >>> There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally >>> separate tools for textures >>> vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI >>> >>> On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind <[email protected]> wrote: >>> > 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. >>> >> > > > -- > Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it > and let them flee like the dogs they are! >
