No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

General discussion about 3D DCC and other topics
Bullit
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No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Bullit » 18 Mar 2014, 19:05

... Softimage.

Reading to this http://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost ... epth-look/ it is clear the Bifrost team can't handle turning to much other things than fluids, so next years we will see viscosity, fume, spray/foam! with eventually a node based graph like Next Limits Realflow.

In short they are trying to hit Nextlimit in the balls and nothing more.

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origin
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Location: warsaw

Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by origin » 18 Mar 2014, 19:45

http://area.autodesk.com/3dsmax2015
another fail release. Switching to max is like abandoning Dead xsi for Walking Dead max.

http://area.autodesk.com/maya2015
it seems they didnt have enough time to get full naiad integrated

"“3ds Max is a great software if you are a single artist or are working on a small team and you need to fix something very quickly." –Tomek Baginski Director Platige Image"

they forgot to mention...afaik platige is switching to maya slowly. like most studios here in warsaw.

"Learn from Damian Nenow, Director Platige Image how he uses Noise control in 3ds max to quickly animate almost anything."
just wow.

Bullit
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Bullit » 18 Mar 2014, 19:50

Yeah that noise thing seemed like a joke. I was just so is this it? Do they didn't even offer the script, probably will be in Max 2016 as an sizeable "improvement"...

iamVFX
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by iamVFX » 19 Mar 2014, 07:38

Naiad’s photorealistic liquid simulation technology
With so much brand-new technology
Image

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 10:39

No ICE?

This is the year that Fabric Engine goes Nodal. I'd say that for ICE fans like me, coming up is going to be the most exciting time yet!

Fabric Engine was born from ICE, on the concept of 'what if the power of ICE was uncoupled to any specific DCC package?'



We are used to this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNv5sPu0C1E

but Fabric Engine brings this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpXMGit4P8

iamVFX
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by iamVFX » 19 Mar 2014, 10:52

Paul, what if I tell you that node based system can be described in less than a thousand lines of code?...


Image

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 11:08

I spoke to Fabric about how feasible it was to start seeing Visual programming soon. My concern being that ICE took a long time to develop.

The difference in development speed between Fabrics Nodal Environment and ICE is that a lot of the groundwork to ICE was not in the mechanics of ICE itself, it was making all the required changes in Softimage to acommodate it. Because Fabric doesn't have any of this legacy, I was assured that the speed of development is incomparible to ICE.

Visual Programming is now one of their highest Priorities and we should see the first signs of it soon. My tinkering with KL code in Fabric, gives me the impression that it will be very familiar to ICE users, using many of the same concepts such as locations.

iamVFX
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by iamVFX » 19 Mar 2014, 11:22

Funny that you mentioned locations... I see them now as a pretty ugly concept to deal with... I mean there's no such thing as location, there's position + normal, color or whatever attribute, those attributes are interpolated at that position or gathered from neighbour points, which require operations that takes time to calculate, you can't pretend that they're just there for free, sitting at that point and taking computer's memory... It's that OOP shit programmers love...

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 11:26

my point was just that Fabric wont seem completely alien to Softimage users, mr Picky.

iamVFX
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by iamVFX » 19 Mar 2014, 11:45

Pooby wrote:my point was just that Fabric wont seem completely alien to Softimage users, mr Picky.
:D

Just be carefull with big proprietary software. As Softimage users we know what the risks are.

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 11:47

I love taking risks. Its fundimental to being me.

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McNistor
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by McNistor » 19 Mar 2014, 14:35

Hey Paul, it is not news for me that you're a big fan of FE since it's the closest thing to ICE as of now, but I'm curios about what 3d app will you choose to have your FE tools plugged into.
I know you'll stay with Soft for now, but when that time comes, you know... where will you go, Maya, Houdini or other? Perhaps you didn't even thought about it yet, or thought about it but didn't choose yet? Any inclinations?
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
-Thucydides

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 15:02

Whilst using Softimage for the next 2 or 3 years at least, I will assess the situation during which I will develop in Fabric to keep options open.
I do want to learn Houdini too, at least for what it brings in FX terms.

Who knows what might happen? Maybe Autdesk's controlling plans win out and Houdini users move over to Bifrost. The Foundry give up on Modo. Fabric can't compete with Bifrost and go belly up etc.

I like to think that instead. There will continue to be vibrant competitors trying to provide better, faster ways of doing things for different types of artists.
At the moment there is little apart from Sofimage for the Artist /Tool maker like me. Houdini is closest right now, but I just feel that Fabric is more aligned to what I will need in general terms.

As to what package stuff the gets rendered in, I'm open.. At the end of the day for me, Arnold in any package is just the same. Its the tools to make stuff that I'm more interested in. Maybe Fabric will have a scene layout environment for the tools to meet by then.

I have a tendency also to go against the flow, partly to keep things lively and interesting and discover new stuff that others aren't doing. I can't stomach the thought of plodding in line with everyone else using the same tools and workflows. Thats not what I come into work for every day.

Bullit
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Bullit » 19 Mar 2014, 15:29

Yes i 'll look to Fabric but i am curious about what iamVFX thinks about a nodal interface since i agree that locations add to confusion unnecessarily. I mean if someone wants locations just make an attribute. For example an attribute should be possible to be a compound of attributes.

I think a nodal environment the first thing to setup is the language to define the parts of it.

Pooby
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by Pooby » 19 Mar 2014, 15:39

Locations are just ways of reading data from one mesh or particle to another. There is nothing particularly strange about them.
You raycast or get closest location etc.. then read whatever attribute you want at that point. Thats all they are. The interesting thing about them in ICE is that they persist.

iamVFX
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Re: No ICE for foreseeable future except in Houdini and...

Post by iamVFX » 19 Mar 2014, 17:04

Pooby wrote:You raycast or get closest location etc.. then read whatever attribute you want at that point. Thats all they are.
You're not reading those attributes, you're computing them. It's a big difference when we're talking about big amount of data. You may wonder how it knows where closest location of a point is, an the truth is: it doesn't, so it should find it first. How to find it is implementation-dependant - it may use kd-tree, it may use raycasting, you don't know and have no control over it. Even if you found closest point cheaply enough - say we got location as a point between three vertices - if you want get normal of that point it will fire up another function to find what normal closest point should have.

Again, you might think it's fast enough so you can don't bother, and sometimes it is with modern hardware that Fabric utilize, but there always be a limit. Specifying it as an attribute is wrong because it's a series of computationally-heavy operations that one may use inappropriately. I heard a story from a Google employe that once in a while their servers may down because someone could call a function in their code to get an "attribute" (like closest location), but what really happens underneath is a call of sort function over whole user database.
Bullit wrote:i am curious about what iamVFX thinks about a nodal interface
I wrote a post in my blog two years ago, I still think it is the way people would interact with computers more intuitively if node environment is implemented properly... I always think "how would I design such a framework with minimum amount of code to fight overcomplexity and maximum amount of possibilities to replace text-based programming languages". Look at C, such a simple and small one, but what it generated! Imagine C language in a form of nodes... I would program on that!

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