My Wishlist for Softimage... maybe 2013 ?

[nuverian]

@bottleofram: I certainly do NOT do CG for so long, but I liked you post a lot and it's outcome. Just wanted to say that.

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

Honestly, I have only one wish:

Reliabilty.

Achim

Do you have any idea what actions are causing these crashes? I was having quite a few myself but 2 things cured it:

1) Turn OFF "Threaded Optimization" in Nvidia drivers. This causes all sorts of UI related crashes, especially with the render region tool but also in many different windows including the ice tree.

2) If MR is crashing, force ON "Convert Textures to Memory Maps" in the global settings.

With these two changes I've worked for about 2 weeks without a single crash and I've been pushing it hard.

Try it, see if that makes a difference for you.

@action art
I´m thankful for whatever helps even a bit, will try it. I have all kind of problems though from mr muttering when rendering shaderballs in the material manager to a lot of corrupted scene data.

Achim

[ActionArt]

Something serious is wrong then, that's not the norm. Perhaps a fresh install and then add only the addons you need one at a time.

[Hirazi Blue]

@Lord Futzi Voldemort - runonce.bat?

[ActionArt]

One other thing SI support suggested when I was having trouble was to re-name your user directory and test from there. That helps determine if it's a third party problem.

Another thing, if you're using the "dual" screen layout preset try default. For some unknown reason I had a whole lot of unexplained crashes with it. No idea why...

Maybe also deactivate shaderballs in the material manager for a while?

[Memag]

Though these would be interesting to play with and get inspired.

WebGL Water

WebGL path tracing

Other cool stuff

[Kzin]

the xsi viewport will not feature fast rendering previews in the future.
also iray will not come that fast to xsi, so the best is to use arnold, or, if someone at ad has a good day, we will see the implementation of mr's progressive rendering.

[Memag]

the xsi viewport will not feature fast rendering previews in the future.
also iray will not come that fast to xsi, so the best is to use arnold, or, if someone at ad has a good day, we will see the implementation of mr's progressive rendering.

How do you know what future holds? All I know things are pretty unpredictable and anything could happen (remember Avid -> AD).
Technology changes rapidly and I think such viewport interaction will eventually be a standard.
Many users can't get Arnold, but there's Vray™ also , so...

Softimage's program manager's current position is to not have iray in softimage. Not because it's awesome and must be reserved for Max, but because isn't so hot, and it isn't useful for most of the user base (everything must fit in the GPU RAM for using the GPU, no motion blur, no programmable shader trees, no particles, etc) and is costly to integrate and maintain. (It's not going to be in Maya either, afaik) The time that would be spent on that will be spent instead on the OpenGL Viewports, maintenance/stability of the current rendering engine, and helping third parties such as Arnold.

[Hirazi Blue]

@Kzin - Insider knowledge or "pessimistic" outlook on the future?

[Kzin]

the xsi viewport will not feature fast rendering previews in the future.
also iray will not come that fast to xsi, so the best is to use arnold, or, if someone at ad has a good day, we will see the implementation of mr's progressive rendering.

How do you know what future holds? All I know things are pretty unpredictable and anything could happen (remember Avid -> AD).
Technology changes rapidly and I think such viewport interaction will eventually be a standard.
Many users can't get Arnold, but there's Vray™ also , so...

Softimage's program manager's current position is to not have iray in softimage. Not because it's awesome and must be reserved for Max, but because isn't so hot, and it isn't useful for most of the user base (everything must fit in the GPU RAM for using the GPU, no motion blur, no programmable shader trees, no particles, etc) and is costly to integrate and maintain. (It's not going to be in Maya either, afaik) The time that would be spent on that will be spent instead on the OpenGL Viewports, maintenance/stability of the current rendering engine, and helping third parties such as Arnold.

who would implement a path tracing render previewsystem in xsi when your final rendersystem does not support this tech and the shadersystems are different.
a previewsystem only makes sense if the preview and final renders are consistent. you have this with iray and mr for example because they use the same shaders. i know the limitation of iray. and luceric say why they dont go this way, because it cost to much to code a solution for xsi only.

so i think the short time solution could be the implementation of mr's progressive rendering feature, simply because mental ray is bundeled with xsi.

[Kzin]

@Kzin - Insider knowledge or "pessimistic" outlook on the future?

i dont hink we will see something like in the webtech demos in xsi, because it makes no sense to code a different rendering system then the implemented one.

[Memag]

who would implement a path tracing render previewsystem in xsi when your final rendersystem does not support this tech and the shadersystems are different.
a previewsystem only makes sense if the preview and final renders are consistent. you have this with iray and mr for example because they use the same shaders. i know the limitation of iray. and luceric say why they dont go this way, because it cost to much to code a solution for xsi only.

so i think the short time solution could be the implementation of mr's progressive rendering feature, simply because mental ray is bundeled with xsi.

I did not say it will be implemented, I just posted the link because I thought it's cool stuff. However, things constantly change and evolve, nothing will be impossible in the future.
Truth is, I couldn't post in "Open Discussion" due to some "service unavailable" error, so I posted in "2013 wishlist" thread as it was most appropriate place, in which I was able to post it.

edit:

This is interesting as well.

[Kzin]

I did not say it will be implemented, I just posted the link because I thought it's cool stuff. However, things constantly change and evolve, nothing will be impossible in the future.

Cheers

it would be great to have something like this in xsi, wishlist is right, but i think no one will hear you. ;)

[face]

Many thinks can be done with a custom display host.
Also the implementation in the existing preview window is possible and working ;)

face

[bottleofram]

This is interesting as well.

Its certainly making a case for moving lighting/rendering out of the general 3D packages.

On other note, Hirazi pointed out here how developers struggle with soft's name and I claimed AD got it wrong. In that video, Softimage basically gets 3 mentions for the price of one so I think I should eat my words. It was a brilliant decision after all. (sorry for the offtopic)

[luceric]

maybe this is obvious because I'm a programmer, but there is no link between that water demo and iray.
it's very easy to write a demo that make interactive water on a grid and casts rays at the bottom of a pool. people have been doing it since the Amiga, and it's even easier now with OpenGL. I had one that ran on DOS and looked exactly like this one. there are a lot of real time ray tracing demos out there. that's not a generic renderer, it's one custom effect and you can't use it in production unless that exactly the effect you need and have no other requirement. in any case, whether you agree or not, iray doesn't do that. iray is not a magic thing that turns things real-time. its goal is to use cuda to accelerate arch viz, and it's not real time ray tracing either.