What if Softimage died?

General discussion about 3D DCC and other topics

Softimage is unofficially dead what would you do ?

Poll ended at 05 Oct 2013, 13:10

Switch to Maya (including LT) / Max
13
14%
Continue using Softimage for a few years to come
59
61%
Blender
6
6%
Houdini
12
13%
Modo
2
2%
Other
4
4%
 
Total votes: 96

NNois
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by NNois » 22 Oct 2013, 21:09

hey bullit, i think you are a bit negative...
Luc-eric is right,
At this time i was switching from LW to XSI 3.5, Soft was clearly the best rendering package out there (and a productivity dream).
Mental ray was amazing in therms of quality and speed compared to other alailables renderers in other DCC

luceric
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by luceric » 23 Oct 2013, 00:42

Bullit wrote:
There was nobody that doubted mental ray in those years. And mental ray has consistently been used in architecture.
Except thousands that flocked to Vray and others. Unless you tell me they went to 3dsMax due to scanline render...
Vray, Finalrender,Brazil were the engines that made possible to replicate lets call it mythical rendering that Daniel Martinez Lara made with Arnold at begin of the century. And everyone went after it. This was GI.
Arnold vs global illumimation in mental ray. I was there with the community 13 years ago taking about this very subject and doing test renders with another user from umlaut.com who did viz. There are still some traces here and there, like this one http://www.creativecrash.com/forums/xsi ... d-renderer
That version of Arnold used in Pepe was never released and the speed and quality was never verified by a second party. So anyone saying that FG in mental ray was slow were comparing with classic ray tracing and had never experienced GI. The GI in mental ray was implemented by Henrik Wann Jensen who won an oscar for his research in the field. Read more about rendering: Photon Mapping and Final Gathering are fundamental techniques. mental ray always beat the other renderers in pure ray tracing speed, so caustics were faster, and quality was renown to be high in general.

In 2004 you could get a great modeling/animation/simulation/rendering app for just 450$, including the oscar-winning mental ray, back in 2005. it was an awesome deal. It didn't need to be absolutely "best evar" viz renderer, the vast majority of viz is not the best, it's hyper-real viz for the client to get a general sense of things.

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Mathaeus
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Oct 2013, 01:42

NNois wrote:hey bullit, i think you are a bit negative...
Luc-eric is right,
At this time i was switching from LW to XSI 3.5, Soft was clearly the best rendering package out there (and a productivity dream).
Mental ray was amazing in therms of quality and speed compared to other alailables renderers in other DCC
Don't want to be on any side there, don't know what is other DCC (probably Maya and nothing else). But, sorry, for me and my little experience in these times ( a lot of PovRay, Max default scanline, a bit of early vRay, Lightwave by my former colleague) - no in any way. MR has a few impressive third party shaders, good AO for baking, all the rest were problems and nothing else than problems. XSI implementation actually only created illusion that's possible to do something. MR wasn't even advertised with word 'fast'. It was scalable, programmable.. forgot third word.
In other words, all my animation still relied on Max default scanline, stills on POV-RAy or Lightwave. XSI for baking, stylized stills, that's all.

Anyway, early Vray, if I'm correct, heavy depended on Max rendering API, it wasn't transferable to anything else.

IMO it was some kind of cultural problem of entire Softimage community, perhaps some Maya people too. If something got Oscar or it was in some Sigraph paper, these fanboys weren't be able to admit that the thing is actually.. nothing especial, nicely to say. Except maybe for writing the yet yet yet another AO shader.
But someone who lived far away from buzzwords of mainstream, was been able to find the correct recipe. And that's V-Ray.
After all, compare the Friday Flashback and contemporary De Espona works for first versions of Max, you'll see what visual crap Softimage offered in these times. To be fair, Maya works from these times looked much better.

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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Bullit » 23 Oct 2013, 03:34

Arnold vs global illumimation in mental ray. I was there with the community 13 years ago taking about this very subject and doing test renders with another user from umlaut.com who did viz. There are still some traces here and there, like this one http://www.creativecrash.com/forums/xsi-general/topics/arnold-renderer
That version of Arnold used in Pepe was never released and the speed and quality was never verified by a second party. So anyone saying that FG in mental ray was slow were comparing with classic ray tracing and had never experienced GI. The GI in mental ray was implemented by Henrik Wann Jensen who won an oscar for his research in the field. Read more about rendering: Photon Mapping and Final Gathering are fundamental techniques. mental ray always beat the other renderers in pure ray tracing speed, so caustics were faster, and quality was renown to be high in general.
I posted about Arnold to say what everyone was after in GI render engines, those that achieved that look were the 3 i posted. Try to get it with Mentalray Softimage V4 and in 2004 was already late since Finalrender appeared in 2001.
hey bullit, i think you are a bit negative...
Luc-eric is right,
At this time i was switching from LW to XSI 3.5, Soft was clearly the best rendering package out there (and a productivity dream).
Mental ray was amazing in therms of quality and speed compared to other alailables renderers in other DCC
I came from Max, worked with scanline up until 2001, from then on with Finalrender and later Vray and i disagree :) . When i went to Softimage rendering was the real downer.
If i am not mistaken for a period so called Mental ray GI couldn't even work with Final Gathering at same time.
IMO it was some kind of cultural problem of entire Softimage community, perhaps some Maya people too. If something got Oscar or it was in some Sigraph paper, these fanboys weren't be able to admit that the thing is actually.. nothing especial, nicely to say. Except maybe for writing the yet yet yet another AO shader.
Mathaeus i think it is related to the fact that GI rendering arrived much later to big productions because it was very expensive for cinema resolutions. If the top guys didn't cared about GI then Softimage didn't make it a priority to sort it out.
What Hollywood was doing? nothing related to GI so... The minions out of school were and some more advanced, curious architectural and design firms. At that time the rendering for video wasn't HD which practically didn't existed yet, it was the typical 720x576 of PAL and the NTSC equivalent with fields...

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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Bellsey » 23 Oct 2013, 12:44

I remember when those Pepeland renders came out, I was on the customer/production side of the fence back then. When those images and videos were released, everyone wanted to know how to do them, or if they could get the renderer.
Everyone went crazy for GI and FG, but I'd bet that alot of people didn't really know what it was, or if it would actually be useful for them. They saw something new that seemingly produced amazing images and just had to have it.

I never had any problems with Mental Ray back then, but like any renderer at the time, you had to invest some time to get the results you wanted. Some things were easy to work, others took longer and it was often the implementation into your 3D software of choice that kinda influenced this. XSI had great rendering capability and personally I've always regarded it as having the best MR intergration (even, imho in the most up to date releases). You could actually do GI and FG in XSI/Mental Ray fairly easily once you understood how it worked. I can't recall the version number but I think it was XSI 3.5.

I think what the likes of Vray did is kinda take away some of the complexity of the setup, and made it easy to do this type of thing. Alot of people wanted the high quality renders, but didn't have the time, budget, or frankly the knowledge or applitude to do it. As soon as something came along that made it easier to produce the images you wanted, then it became a no brainer for people, especially on the Max side.

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farhaad_yousefi
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by farhaad_yousefi » 23 Oct 2013, 14:09

i wish autodesk sell it to Adobe ;) :ymdaydream:
other than that;
Modo/Mari/Nuke are in the same team and that's awesome. *-:)

azurecgi
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by azurecgi » 23 Oct 2013, 14:20

farhaad_yousefi wrote:i wish autodesk sell it to Adobe ;) :ymdaydream:
That is wishful thinking!

If (when!) Autodesk decide they no longer wish to support Softimage, they will simply shelve it. What they paid for it is peanuts in the larger scheme of things.

I had a copy of Realviz Matchmover Professional before Autodesk bought them out. That software cost me the best part of £3k, but when the buyout came, it was gone, no support, no upgrades, nothing! What did Autodesk do with it? they bundled it free with all their 3D packages!!!

So on the upside (looking at it really optimistically), maybe Softimage will get bundled with Maya eventually as a 'particle/crowd/deformation' tool :(

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Mathaeus
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Oct 2013, 14:44

Bullit wrote:
If i am not mistaken for a period so called Mental ray GI couldn't even work with Final Gathering at same time.
well it was able, concept was to get multiple bounce with photons, final gathering at the end. But, yeah, it was a blind following of that unhappy concept of two artifact generators at the same time.
V-Ray has V-Ray radiosity from day one, and default was iradiance map (let's say final gathering) plus brute force for secondaries. Everything still traced from surfaces, not from light. Modo renderer has similar concept, too. That is, renderers with good reputation in this field, does not follows the photons+final gather concept. Other than these two, 3delight has photons+gather for some time, but it's removed from latest versions. Blender Yafaray also was photon+gather, also without some success.
Around XSI 5, MR admitted defeat and tried to follow V-ray, by allowing multiple FG bounces, but this and everything else after, was a just a not-so-sucessfull following.

About Hollywood, ironically, there is an old sentence, that about 90% of Oscars belongs to Renderman, not to MR. Softimage spent a fortune to integrate with underdog (and it always been underdog), not ever had a power to connect to boss, like Maya did.

Imho, it's not only about radiosity or raytracing. At least if 3delight can be used as reference of REYES renderer, it was also about speed, consistency, stability (if you see first pixel in first frame, 99% chance you'll see last pixel of last frame, without using the render manager), tons of options for baking and reusing later, literally perfect anti-aliasing, 3d motion blur at no cost, rendering the high resolution even proportionally faster, so on.

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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Bullit » 23 Oct 2013, 17:42

I think it was a bug that sent the render times to stratosphere when both were used, but i might making a mistake, it was almost 10 yrs ago.
As soon as something came along that made it easier to produce the images you wanted, then it became a no brainer for people, especially on the Max side.
Yes, as strange has it looks 3dsMax benefited due to not have a competitive render, it has instead an open SDK. They had only scanline and then in some version put some radiosity thing, sort of hack, i think it came from a famous radiosity application at time Lightscape , then they give up and went Mental ray. 3dsMax without plugins will be dead already.

luceric
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by luceric » 23 Oct 2013, 17:52

Mathaeus wrote:
NNois wrote:At this time i was switching from LW to XSI 3.5, Soft was clearly the best rendering package out there (and a productivity dream).
Mental ray was amazing in therms of quality and speed compared to other alailables renderers in other DCC
Don't want to be on any side there, don't know what is other DCC (probably Maya and nothing else). But, sorry, for me and my little experience in these times ( a lot of PovRay, Max default scanline, a bit of early vRay, Lightwave by my former colleague) - no in any way. MR has a few impressive third party shaders, good AO for baking, all the rest were problems and nothing else than problems. XSI implementation actually only created illusion that's possible to do something. MR wasn't even advertised with word 'fast'. It was scalable, programmable.. forgot third word.[...]
After all, compare the Friday Flashback and contemporary De Espona works for first versions of Max, you'll see what visual crap Softimage offered in these times. To be fair, Maya works from these times looked much better.
Mathaeus wrote:About Hollywood, ironically, there is an old sentence, that about 90% of Oscars belongs to Renderman, not to MR. Softimage spent a fortune to integrate with underdog (and it always been underdog), not ever had a power to connect to boss, like Maya did.
ILM and obviously Pixar have renderman licenses for free, which also part of why they use it for everything that did not require ray tracing, combined with the need for a good custom shader API, which many of the faster renderers did not have at all. However, ILM and other were using Mental Ray as a "ray server" to renderman. It was used on star wars prequels and many other movies. Even when Renderman finally got ray tracing, it was terribly slow and lost all of its performance benfits when you used it. Renderman's ray tracing only began to be usable in 2011.

Other mental ray film clients: Buf, Digital Domain, DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Mill, MPC, Animal Logic, The Orphanage, etc.

Famously, the Matrix movies were all-mental ray movies, and a lot of the features of MR came from that a few years ago. In the softimage world we know Hybride have used mental ray on all the movies they've worked on, and it's been used in many other movies internationally such as Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, City of Lost Chidren and other. Mental Ray is a product that's always had problem and some settings like BSP and samplings have been difficult to set compared to more broadcast solutions. But it's an attempt to rewrite history to say that everyone has always hated it and it was hardly used, and would have held back the success of Foundation. It's still today the most used renderer.

With regards to rendering everything in Max's scanline, Softimage 3D also had its own very fast scanline renderer. It doesn't matter, by the end of 90s everyone knew that custom shaders (plugins or user shader trees) were the way to go, even if that meant a hit in performance. It's a bit of a waste of time to talk about mental ray being slower than using default shader in a fixed pipeline renderer on a single core machine 15 years ago. You would have found Renderman terribly slow to get something as simple reflections, and on top of that renderman was not multithreaded! Renderman was a toolkit with a collection of tricks and steps to get something that is automatic in a ray tracer.

I don't know what any of this has to do with VRay and Final Render since neither of those have ever been used in movies until recently (in the case of VRay), and were not a factor 10 years ago. Mental Ray was the faster ray tracer with custom shaders in those years, and the only one that had a sane API and distributed ray tracing.

Mental Ray was also used with Solid Works, Dassault's CATIA and others, and used in every game cinematics that came out of Japan. The 1997 softimage-made game Riven brought a lot of people to Mental Ray as well. If you were just a preset button-pusher, the lighting and sampling was higher quality in mental ray 2.x than other renderer, which is why alias stop working on the built-in renderer in maya, softimage stopped the renderer in softimage|3d, and autodesk stopped its scanline renderer development and licensed mental ray.

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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Letterbox » 23 Oct 2013, 19:50

luceric wrote:
Famously, the Matrix movies were all-mental ray movies, and a lot of the features of MR came from that a few years ago.
FYI... luceric
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/movies-and-awards

There is even a image shown from the film "the Matrix", saying "supplied by Manex Visual effects", who won the oscar for it. Realistically though, when your shipping to multiple vfx vendors they'll use what renderer they prefer, but everyone tries to sell it as "WE" did it to gain some traction.
luceric wrote: It's still today the most used renderer.
Counting how exactly??? Shipped with product x,y,z? Oscars won? Movies made? TV? Architectural? Games? To state that as an absolute for any renderer is impossible, without lots of *'s. And lots of small print.

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Mathaeus
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Oct 2013, 20:18

luceric wrote: With regards to rendering everything in Max's scanline, Softimage 3D also had its own very fast scanline renderer. It doesn't matter, by the end of 90s everyone knew that custom shaders (plugins or user shader trees) were the way to go, even if that meant a hit in performance.
From fx guide article, you already cited:

One of the most common renderers in the world is the 3ds Max Scanline renderer. This is one of four renderers that ships with 3ds Max. According to a source at Autodesk, still today “80 per cent of 3ds Max users still use this in some way or another.”

As we all know, only Softimage users should live without old fashion renderer. Not everyone.

luceric
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by luceric » 23 Oct 2013, 20:57

Mathaeus wrote:[From fx guide article, you already cited:
One of the most common renderers in the world is the 3ds Max Scanline renderer. This is one of four renderers that ships with 3ds Max. According to a source at Autodesk, still today “80 per cent of 3ds Max users still use this in some way or another.”

As we all know, only Softimage users should live without old fashion renderer. Not everyone.
I think the built-in scanline renderer in max isn't used directly by many people to render frames, but it's used for material previews and to show procedural textures in the viewport. which it why it would say "in some way or another". Same thing in Maya - you can't easily ever remove it from the product.

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Mathaeus
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Oct 2013, 21:14

Just for info, one traditional usage is getting the preview with 100% correct, camera sampled motion blur. I remember how deadly slow was to get something comparable in XSI 4 'hardware renderer".
Of course, today a lot of new people probably don't know what to do with Max default scanline, but, in 2004, for me, it was clear that Foundation thing is an experiment, not even having the basics to survive in small shops - which was a target, I guess.

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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by luceric » 23 Oct 2013, 21:23

what do you mean by hardware renderer? (we haven't had motion blur with opengl?)

btw mental ray in Max in those days was very very slow compared to mental ray in XSI. The reason is that it exported a .mi2 file and then launched mental ray. XSI's live connection to mental ray (share memory and geometry directly) means there is none of the overhead and it's pretty much the same as having a "default" built-in renderer.
Mathaeus wrote: but, in 2004, for me, it was clear that Foundation thing is an experiment, not even having the basics to survive in small shops - which was a target, I guess.
well there was no other renderer than mental ray for softimage, so the entire user base including the small shops, and students, using softimage used it with success. this seems to be revisionist.

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Mathaeus
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Re: What if Softimage died?

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Oct 2013, 22:12

luceric wrote:what do you mean by hardware renderer? (we haven't had motion blur with opengl?)

btw mental ray in Max in those days was very very slow compared to mental ray in XSI. The reason is that it exported a .mi2 file and then launched mental ray. XSI's live connection to mental ray (share memory and geometry directly) means there is none of the overhead and it's pretty much the same as having a "default" built-in renderer.
I'd say, yes and no - it was a period around XSI 5 I think, about six months, when XSI was unable to get anything more than default sampling in rasterizer, while the same thing in Max worked. But, why to use MR in Max... To be fair, I think the world record of NaNs percentage on screen, belongs to dieletric shader in Max, in these times. You remember these NaN epidemics, don't you.

regarding Open Gl, I think it was something called multi.. pass or something, able to create some kind of motion blur, but maybe I;m wrong, It was slow, anyway.

about revisionism, I really don't feel as leader, here, in this field :)
In these times, yeah I desperately wanted to believe in that MR story, but, believing was all, unfortunately...

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