Re: ICE team went to Maya (2011)

[Jason S]

Indeed that's why I corrected myself, having recalled SideFX (also) having their own publicized SI team which referred to workflow and not ICE which indeed leaves not much to be desired functionality-wise for Houdini except maybe also the 'workflow' or general ease-of-use of ICE... (despite also being not always easy for everyone).. But speaking of workflow, there was a recent Video from someone adopting Houdini, which I think shows exactly both the main strength and the main drawback of Houdini at the same time. Making a neat and quite detailed retro neon sign, with lightbulbs, neon fixtures and all that, at the end he could dynamically change the amount of fixtures, or dynamically change basically anything. But the time (and complication) involved setting everything up.. in my opinion is worth it if you need a bunch of similar but different things, being faster to redo different variations once the setup is there. And although the fact that you could also do an almost entirely (or partly) procedural dynamic sing (or whatever) setup in XSI is besides the point, (being perhaps less, but also very non-destructive, perhaps like what AfterEffects is to Nuke at least for the stack) the point is you don't -have- to keep everything dynamic if you don't need to, and get things done in a jiffy with much less head scratching or chin rubbing , and you can then say, ok next? That while having quite a bit of things that really don't take any more or less time making (or leaving) them dynamic or not, and involves somewhat minimal history stack management (which otherwise you barely know it's there until you need it or want to clear it) if and when needed to remain fully procedural, perhaps with compounds with exposed params or custom parameters driving operator properties and such (for quick editing in unified property sets -if- necessary). usually being a pretty tiny percentage of things, like we end-up freezing most of everything that doesn't need to remain live once their done. Making it not only a good compromise between fully procedural and non-procedural, but also a best both worlds in many respects. But I guess Houdini doesn't have something that drives many Houdini users away... which doesn't matter if you're at a place who doesn't care about 'dead' labels while waiting for better things, or for things to become better. That being said, even when only looking at what can work best, Houdini of course obviously (also) has it's own strengths uses and place. For Fabric, although I think adopting a visual development environment is a step in the right direction, I personally would hope they would move still quite a bit further away from being a "mostly for TD's" thing, and would also feel more confident if it wasn't subject to what host DCC's allows to be accessed being probably widely varying from a DDC to another concerning it's scope or reach. say if it could be fully unrestrained in it's own standalone environment, cause ICE apart geo and rig processing, can (very interactively) get & set pretty much anything in a given scene, weight maps, uv's, CAV's, particles/strands, materials, any animatable parameter can be ICE driven or drive other ICE things, ... and above-all, all in a very (yet relatively) non-'overtechnical' setting. I guess time will tell. cheers, On 06/09/15 23:09, Raffaele Fragapane wrote: Should probably add, modelling too, and you can pretty much swap animation and modelling in my mail above and all of it remains pretty much true :) On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 1:07 PM, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsil...@googlemail.com> wrote: They never said anything involving ICE AFAIK. They did mention that they are trying to make Houdini more pleasant to use, and want animation (the user facing, artist oriented part of it) to receive more attention, and that they have a Softimage developer on board contributing to that. Both those statements are true. They are doing good work in those regards, and part of that work is done by an ex Softie. To my knowledge that's the extent of it. I've yet to see or hear ICE mentioned at all, let alone ex developers of it, by SideFX people. On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Andy Goehler <lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com> wrote: On Jun 05, 2015, at 22:02, Jason S <jasonsta...@gmail.com> wrote: …Houdini says has an ICE team… Do they? I don’t recall, have any sources? -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!