Some news from Siggraph

[grreez]

looks like he might not know what retopology tools are. Actually, given all the games modeling being done in XSI, retopo tools would be more obviously needed than nurbs tools.

Well, then please enlighten me. What are the retopology tools you need or i should know about?

[luceric]

what's your background? I don't understand how you could think you have everything that could be needed in XSI's polygon toolset. The only thing XSI has is a basic draw polygon tool and snapping (which everyone has) and the symmetry support almost none-existant. Maya and many other apps have a brush tools to free-form paint polygons strips and the tools to easily modify edge density and reflowing. Here is a video of mudbox's automated retopology tools

[grreez]

what's your background? I don't understand how you could think you have everything that could be needed in XSI's polygon toolset. The only thing XSI has is a basic draw polygon tool and snapping (which everyone has) and the symmetry support almost none-existant. Maya and many other apps have a brush tools to free-form paint polygons strips and the tools to easily modify edge density and reflowing. Here is a video of mudbox's automated retopology tools

I use zbrush and know how these things work, and they are fine but unfortunately not enough for CA. I never touched mudbox so can't judge how good are the results.
When i do box or edge modelling in si i tend to do it properly from the very beginning, i take responsibility for every edge flow myself and don't need any retopology tools after i finished modelling.

[Pooby]

Xsi certainly has everything needed for speedy retop. Ive used lots of retop tools and prefer to use xsi.
Whether it has everything wanted is a matter of personal taste.

[AlexanderM]

At first it is necessary to have good and fast viewport. For work with paint and retopology highpoly meshes.

luceric, please tell, why HQV so slow and lag? What technical problems?

[gustavoeb]

Dont know about Maya, but Max for example has the almighty graphite-bar embedded plugin, but lacks a shrink-wrap deformer, so you can draw strips alright, but what if then you choose to move points with soft-selection. Can it do that?
In SI you can do that trick of throwing the shrink-wrap up above the modeling stack and do anything below in a non-destructive fashion. Well but you know all that.

Of course everyone can always do with better more streamlined tools, and we know thats not what anyone will get... in SI that is

[Bellsey]

http://area.autodesk.com/industrynews/u ... extensions

whats missing in this page?

No Motionbuilder.

Wow, that's so funny it truly must hurt...

@all - It has been obvious for quite some time our "resident" Autodesk employees for the most part
do not care about Softimage at all. So be it, but please don't rub it in!

Well I was trying to be funny and clearly failing.

And I do care, perhaps more than people might realise.

[Mathaeus]

I don't understand how you could think you have everything that could be needed in XSI's polygon toolset. The only thing XSI has is a basic draw polygon tool and snapping (which everyone has) and the symmetry support almost none-existant. Maya and many other apps have a brush tools to free-form paint polygons strips and the tools to easily modify edge density and reflowing. Here is a video of mudbox's automated retopology tools

Well I know you know that number of available tools isn't only that counts. For me, less = better. Main advantage of SI is what Gustavo mentioned with shrink wrap, That is, smaller number of tools but a lot of ways to use them. Except, maybe, if someone is doing the same task during few months. Afaik, a lot of Max or Lightwave people are afraid of construction history in maya or SI, and general complexity of app, even that could be enough to avoid Maya or SI.
Don't know that much about modelling in Maya, but I do know, that habit of using the another apps for modeling ( Silo, Modo, whatever), belongs only to Maya people. That's a proven easy way to recognize Maya user on forums And I didn't sow anything like "with new great modeling tools in Maya 2014 or so, no need for Modo anymore".

Hate to say, but somehow you sounds like representative of some authoritarian regime, saying how everything is good, while TV is showing refugee camps around your borders.

[luceric]

that's fine, not everybody needs to do heavy retopology. I don't know how many people here use the polygon reduction feature in XSI either. Still, I'm pretty sure none of this is going to put topogun out of business.

At first it is necessary to have good and fast viewport. For work with paint and retopology highpoly meshes.
luceric, please tell, why HQV so slow and lag? What technical problems?

Unfortunately. the HQV can't be faster than the standard viewport, because it's same code, plus it does more work. It's the same as the standard viewport, in "OpenGL" mode, plus it installs metaSL shaders and can go draw in additional passes to do high quality lighting or oversampling effects. so the HQV was never going to be the pathway to higher FPS; it was about translating mental ray render trees to realtime shaders. We gave a big push for performance in Softimage 2010

[mirkoj]

in short HQV is hardly ever going to be anything really useful and it was just wasted developing time... just something patched more for marketing purposes then for people to actually use.

[Nizar]

in short HQV is hardly ever going to be anything really useful and it was just wasted developing time... just something patched more for marketing purposes then for people to actually use.

Marketing?!? If HQV is best marketing can producing ADSK, well, they are doomed...


I doing a lot of retopo, modo has some nice tools (contour bridge or topological pen), but softimage is more robust in my opinion, I'm not particular in love with the "too sexy" modo viewport. Blender is also better for retopo (using the some shrink-wrap modifier but also some nice and fast feature like bsurface and F2 addons). In any case, if I excluding some useful autoretopo (in most cases produce some weird and not good for animation meshes) I don't think it is a so critical point for softimage (also I found not so useful the dedicated application for retopo like topogun)

[Hirazi Blue]

Well I was trying to be funny and clearly failing.

And I do care, perhaps more than people might realise.

Well, I do admit that your statement was sort of funny, just less so in this specific context and especially coming from an AD employee in this specific context. As to caring, while this wasn't specifically directed at you: commitment to Autodesk Media & Entertainment isn't the same as commitment to Softimage.
And once Autodesk drops Softimage I just don't see most employees losing much sleep over it.
They will simply have to change their tune a little...

[grreez]

Well I was trying to be funny and clearly failing.

And I do care, perhaps more than people might realise.

Well, I do admit that your statement was sort of funny, just less so in this specific context and especially coming from an AD employee in this specific context. As to caring, while this wasn't specifically directed at you: commitment to Autodesk Media & Entertainment isn't the same as commitment to Softimage.
And once Autodesk drops Softimage I just don't see most employees losing much sleep over it.
They will simply have to change their tune a little...

don't understand how AD can do this to people. I really love Softimage an awful a lot but if the future support is questionable i won't be willing supporting it any longer. I will most likely switch to houdini or cinema 4d. By the way I won't use any of the AD packages simply because the company seem untrustworthy and not reliable.

Moderator edit: removed double post - HB

[luceric]

Well, I do admit that your statement was sort of funny, just less so in this specific context and especially coming from an AD employee in this specific context. As to caring, while this wasn't specifically directed at you: commitment to Autodesk Media & Entertainment isn't the same as commitment to Softimage.
And once Autodesk drops Softimage I just don't see most employees losing much sleep over it.
They will simply have to change their tune a little...

But in all honesty, you don't know the emotions that Softimage employees have about it. You bought Softimage and chat about it a lot, like a sport game where people root for "their team", but that's the extent of your understanding of the Softimage adventure and who are the people in it. You weren't there. Softimage has been with us, Quebecer, since the late 1980s. It's part of our culture and our national pride. And most of us who have worked there, have work for 10, 15, 18 years (bellsey and a couple of the people at fabric are comparatively "newbies"). We've worked on there often 6 or 7 days a week, all of our late 20s and 30s have been dedicated to it. People were met, families were built. It was exhilarating and the best time of our lives. We made it through the frequent layoffs and constant impending doom, and the disappointments, and the successes. We "drank the kool-aid" as the HR told us before leaving in the layoffs of that year.

That company was dissolved in 2008. We had to throw most of the stuff in the office in giant dumpsters and a long row of recycle bins - we could only keep what would fit in two boxes each - and watched the garbage trucks take it away, and then those of use who weren't layed off moved to Autodesk. And the hits kept coming, with finding out how much larger the other product user bases were than we imagined, and that the software was eventually not even going to be made in Montreal anymore. And we mourned, and mourned, and mourned, and thought "what did we do wrong" and what could we have done differently. And it's been 5 years, and the kool aid has worn off, and we don't need to be crying, and self-deluding ourselves about being better at everything, and hating the other products and the people who work on them. Once we met all of these people and learn about these products, we learn that they are bright, passionate people just like us and we're not going to be irrationally stuck the rest of our lives in the year 2008, hating/fearing the other team, hoping for an alternate future. And what do you know, in fact everyone at M&E is an acquisition of some sort, and they've been doing their own mourning (we are in the Discreet building, after all) We're just a lot further along the mourning curve than some of user base that still think Softimage could still be turned around by adding this or that feature, or more tutorials, or whatever magic thinking. Even selling the product at a loss at 450$ didn't work. For us Softimage was a company and the adventure of our lives, it's not a row of icons and set of hotkeys and a some kind of tool in a forum jihad againt Maya. Not anymore, anyway, and that's not because turned our back on what we did and sold out, but rather than we're much more rational now about what software is and what is its purpose.

[Hirazi Blue]

Wow, just wow! Some of what you say, as always, rings true, but silly yet offensive name calling
("forum jihad") should actually be beneath you. And as to my extent of understanding?
You tell me, obviously... You're so good at it!
;)

[Pooby]

Well, I do admit that your statement was sort of funny, just less so in this specific context and especially coming from an AD employee in this specific context. As to caring, while this wasn't specifically directed at you: commitment to Autodesk Media & Entertainment isn't the same as commitment to Softimage.
And once Autodesk drops Softimage I just don't see most employees losing much sleep over it.
They will simply have to change their tune a little...

But in all honesty, you don't know the emotions that Softimage employees have about it. You bought Softimage and chat about it a lot, like a sport game where people root for "their team", but that's the extent of your understanding of the Softimage adventure and who are the people in it. You weren't there. Softimage has been with us, Quebecer, since the late 1980s. It's part of our culture and our national pride. And most of us who have worked there, have work for 10, 15, 18 years (bellsey and a couple of the people at fabric are comparatively "newbies"). We've worked on there often 6 or 7 days a week, all of our late 20s and 30s have been dedicated to it. People were met, families were built. It was exhilarating and the best time of our lives. We made it through the frequent layoffs and constant impending doom, and the disappointments, and the successes. We "drank the kool-aid" as the HR told us before leaving in the layoffs of that year.

That company was dissolved in 2008. We had to throw most of the stuff in the office in giant dumpsters and a long row of recycle bins - we could only keep what would fit in two boxes each - and watched the garbage trucks take it away, and then those of use who weren't layed off moved to Autodesk. And the hits kept coming, with finding out how much larger the other product user bases were than we imagined, and that the software was eventually not even going to be made in Montreal anymore. And we mourned, and mourned, and mourned, and thought "what did we do wrong" and what could we have done differently. And it's been 5 years, and the kool aid has worn off, and we don't need to be crying, and self-deluding ourselves about being better at everything, and hating the other products and the people who work on them. Once we met all of these people and learn about these products, we learn that they are bright, passionate people just like us and we're not going to be irrationally stuck the rest of our lives in the year 2008, hating/fearing the other team, hoping for an alternate future. And what do you know, in fact everyone at M&E is an acquisition of some sort, and they've been doing their own mourning (we are in the Discreet building, after all) We're just a lot further along the mourning curve than some of user base that still think Softimage could still be turned around by adding this or that feature, or more tutorials, or whatever magic thinking. Even selling the product at a loss at 450$ didn't work. For us Softimage was a company and the adventure of our lives, it's not a row of icons and set of hotkeys and a some kind of tool in a forum jihad againt Maya. Not anymore, anyway, and that's not because turned our back on what we did and sold out, but rather than we're much more rational now about what software is and what is its purpose.

For someone who's got over the whole Softimage thing, you spend a lot of time in a Softimage forum, seemingly suggesting others should wise up and do the same.
I don't think many of us would delude ourselves that Softimage would ever be a serious rival to maya in terms of user take up , or development, but many of us would still prefer to use it despite that, as it still has clear advantages for many of us.
For me at least, the spirit of Softimage lives on in Fabric engine. (Which we are already using.) That's where I'll be when I've squeezed the last bit of usefulness from xsi.