Tom that's exactly what I was thinking...Gator has been around for A
LOT, but not Autodesk nor anyone else ( as far as I know ) come up
with something like that, and it's shocking...
Maya is well known for being "You can't do that out-of-the-box, code
it yourself", and no one attempted even?
For the game rigs I'm developing Gator is essential, especially for
facial rigs is a time saver...
I seriously hope that with Fabric Engine a Gator-like tool could be
developed....however its shocking that something so usefull still
isn't within the major DCCs around ( except Blender from what I've read )
2015-05-28 12:28 GMT+02:00 Tom Kleinenberg <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
Is there a reason that it's not included in Maya? I mean, beyond
what Raff's saying about Softimage's handling of properties on
meshes. Is there a weird 3rd party licensing thing?
Would it be possible to replicate GATOR style behaviour using
Fabric or Houdini engine to prevent having to move out of Maya
with all the weirdness that could occur?
On 28 May 2015 at 12:01, Graham Bell <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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]
<mailto:[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] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[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]
<mailto:[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.
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