SPOILER ALERT - general Softimage 2013 description

[gustavoeb]

You are of course entitled to be depressed over the release but it bugs me that people tend to state their opinion as a fact.

Nailed it!
Everyone is entitled to theyre opinions, please dont put words in other peoples mouths...

Anyhow you should read this:

All standard render tree nodes have been converted to support High Quality output – Examples include:
Shadow Pass, Architectural, Environment, Vertex_Color, Incidence

We should realize this is a ginormous amount of work! Even though it does not make SIs viewport the best viewport out there. Even if it is not perfect yet, a major push has been done to convert all shaders to a more modern architecture that will NOT ONLY help people NOW, but possibly pave the way for future work.

I'm, for one, am impressed with the looks of this, and I have a feel this release might grow on people as we touch it.

Ps: The video CLEARLY shows it does Glossines. Which I think is quite nice and even unexpected.

[mattmos]

I'm definitely looking forward to working with the new viewport (god knows I asked for it!). I'm also hoping to see more integration of the render tree into ice too though - it would be great to be able to draw node connections between ice trees and shader trees. Can but dream

[ace63]

what the users want is a viewport that connects between viewport and renderer

If I understood correctly, third party renderers can supply their own realtime shaders that mimic the behaviour of the rendertree nodes.

[Firebird]

I talked to quite a few ppl(friends and other artists) and the most important thing was being able to see normal maps and procedural shaders in the viewport. And they always take performance over quality.
And when I heard the first hints that there will be work done on the viewports, I hoped for an Integration in the normal viewports. Meaning that I can see normal maps and procedurals in textured mode and maybe normal maps in shaded mode without having to switch to the opengl viewport and connect RT shaders.

That would be a huge feature.And could have been enough to make "us" happy. That has nothing todo with HQViewport which still is a great feature on its on.
(might be that its simply not possible with the actual viewports,as I have no clue about programming things like that)


Also a question... Is it possible to manipulate a mesh in HQV? Meaning can I do everything like in the normal Viewports, just much nicer looking?

[ActionArt]

I'm assuming that you can work as usual in HQVP. What might be the most useful thing is that if you turn off some of the advanced calculation intesive stuff the normal day to day work might be much faster than the old OpenGL as it uses new code and seems to bypass the bad OpenGL performance of the new Nvidia cards. We'll have to wait and see if this is true.

People on the list are getting great results with GTX 4 and 5 series cards which I think is great news! Also, it's design might have good longevity as cards increase in power, the advanced features will be more and more useful.

[Hirazi Blue]

I can't tell I which group you are precisely because of those anonymous logins you guys hide behind.

THIS HAS TO STOP NOW! Blaming people they hide behind anonymous logins is ridiculous and offensive as this is not how these kinds of things/forums work. Those of you who are hiding behind such thinly veiled insults should perhaps also reconsider their forum activity.


edit: I explicitly removed the name from the quote as this is not specifically intended for one person...
(and I highlighted "also" also).

[luceric]

I just checked that motorbike scene (it ships with 2013) and it's using 16x MultiSampling, depth of field (which I turned off) and screen-space ambient occlusion. It looks like the foremost problem with the scene is that it's using glossy reflections and metaSL on the GPU would need a lot of samples to emulate that, but they are capped at 1 sample in the setenv.bat (as shown in the video I seem to recall). the bump map on the wall is low res (Castle Wolfenstein 3D anyone?). Anyway here is a higher res screen cap.
You cannot see any textures at all in XSI standard Textured mode.

[ChrB]

For a newly landed gig this is an excellent release, as it includes crowd sims. I was planning to do the coding in ICE myself, but now this might be a bit easier! (Now i better get this release soon and AD pleeeease let this crowd sim be without too many bugs )

For the rest of the stuff, I am not sure this is a 'major release' (whatever that means) or not... I would have liked to see gpu implementation with ICE, better curve tools and Arnold as default render .

[origin]

Can't wait to try new viewport. I wonder if it handles well hardcore map mixing like mix over mix over cc over mix etc? ;)
btw
I hope you guys do realise that with max uber viewport you can't, for example, preview basic stuff like accurate composite of two maps, or other stuff that is visible in this simple bike example (do I see raytraced reflections, or is it env map?) But Im pretty sure nitrous is faster, so the question is do you prefer accurate material preview, or speed of nice lookin viewport (which due to bugs you will eventually disable in max ;)

[grahamef]

I talked to quite a few ppl(friends and other artists) and the most important thing was being able to see normal maps and procedural shaders in the viewport. And they always take performance over quality.
And when I heard the first hints that there will be work done on the viewports, I hoped for an Integration in the normal viewports. Meaning that I can see normal maps and procedurals in textured mode and maybe normal maps in shaded mode without having to switch to the opengl viewport and connect RT shaders.

That would be a huge feature.And could have been enough to make "us" happy. That has nothing todo with HQViewport which still is a great feature on its on.
(might be that its simply not possible with the actual viewports,as I have no clue about programming things like that)


Also a question... Is it possible to manipulate a mesh in HQV? Meaning can I do everything like in the normal Viewports, just much nicer looking?

Yes, you can manipulate a mesh, etc., in HQ mode.

And just to clarify, you don't need to connect RT shaders. The standard shaders have been adapted to work automatically. For custom or third-party shaders, you would need a corresponding MetaSL block to emulate their functionality.

Edited for spellnig.

[grahamef]

Can't wait to try new viewport. I wonder if it handles well hardcore map mixing like mix over mix over cc over mix etc? ;)

I just tried that. Works fine.

do I see raytraced reflections, or is it env map?

It's an environment map. There's no raytracing in HQ mode.

the question is do you prefer accurate material preview, or speed of nice lookin viewport

That's the nub. The goal of HQ mode was accuracy not speed. Of course, you can speed it up by dialing down some of the settings.

[McNistor]

I never understood the zealous requesting for eye candy viewport. This 'shiny' viewport is useless (I'm referring to all shiny viewports - maya's vp2, max's nitrous not just XSI's) except maybe you're doing product viz or some architectural stuff, but even then it's not that useful because you'll find yourself tweaking lighting, shadows, etc with the render engine anyway.

You'll skip a few first steps with the help of viewport, but then the bulk of your tweaking will still be in the render window/region. If you're doing complex animations with characters and/or env that are used for commercials or film, you won't have much use of these fancy viewports (note luceric's comment about this feature appealing more to hobbyist and I agree - once you go deep with what you do in 3d, that viewport is just to make you feel better - model a car, orbit around it for half an hour, go happy to bed). And just for the sake of the universe, why would someone use XSI for arch/viz when clearly there're other better solutions for this.

It always has been this way - some apps being stronger than others at certain stuff - and this will be even more so with ADSK suites. We need to accept this and move on. Had the eye-candy viewport been postponed once again, we'd probably have a richer release feature wise. I know some people will utterly disagree with me about the usefulness of such viewports, but I'm stating an opinion here as we all are.

[jamination]

I think this new release sounds interesting. This is in no disrespect to the developers, just commenting.
As a VFX professional who has worked at a few studios, I can tell you that the new interface enhancements seem like a nice cosmetic addition but in the end I can't see it help anyone get the job done better or faster. I think SI has the greatest modeling toolset in the world. Its stunning how much faster it is than maya, yet most people choose to model in maya at studios to complete work from start to finish... Usually because there are 30 maya licenses to 1 SI license. In that sense I think the package deals are a great idea. Maybe it will get some younger artists, who think maya has the answer to every problem, a chance to see that there are some smarter options for things.

To be honest, the biggest attractions to me are ICE, Arnold integration, and the modeling tools. Using SI with Arnold is simply amazing and I wish it was more available to the public and openly supported by AD.

I hate to say it but it seems like the SI community and users have done more with ICE compounds, addons, and plugins than any updates from AD, which isn't a bad thing at all!

Sorry if I've upset anyone, but this software still has a heafty price tag. I think we should expect a lot for it.

I really feel that Softimage needs some basic sculpting brushes ala modo, while I model in modo I do the shape modeling in Softimage, and would love to see a smooth, pinch and push brush.

[luceric]

I never understood the zealous requesting for eye candy viewport. This 'shiny' viewport is useless (I'm referring to all shiny viewports - maya's vp2, max's nitrous not just XSI's) except maybe you're doing product viz or some architectural stuff, but even then it's not that useful because you'll find yourself tweaking lighting, shadows, etc with the render engine anyway.

You'll skip a few first steps with the help of viewport, but then the bulk of your tweaking will still be in the render window/region. If you're doing complex animations with characters and/or env that are used for commercials or film, you won't have much use of these fancy viewports (note luceric's comment about this feature appealing more to hobbyist and I agree

I don't think being able to see texture blends and accurate lights is eye candy and I didn't say it was for hobbyists. Glossy reflection is ridiculous, but the basic stuff that softimage's viewport doesn't do it is mesmerizing.

Another example, if you have more than 8 lights in XSI, part of your scene is totally black because XSI only uses the first 8 light and then quits! The fact that there are clever work-arounds to Softimage's very old viewport IMHO doesn't mean mean that viewports in Maya, Max, Modo, etc are not useful.

[IslandDreamer]

Debating the relative merits of feature A vs. feature B is missing the point, I think. The problem is Autodesk's annual subscription model. As a starving independent, I feel compelled to pay $750+ every year for a small number of enhancements that don't have very much relevance to my output (game environments).

I love modeling in SI, but with Modo 601 going for only a few dollars more than my annual subscription cost, I'm seriously debating whether I should renew when my current term expires (only a week or so before the 2013 release date).

[ActionArt]

I never understood the zealous requesting for eye candy viewport. This 'shiny' viewport is useless. And just for the sake of the universe, why would someone use XSI for arch/viz when clearly there're other better solutions for this.

I highly disagree with this. If we can see proper lighting, basic shadows, DOF and very accurate surfacing all in real time I think that's very productive. Have you ever tried setting up procedural texture animations when you can't see what's going on?

As for the second statement, many of us freelancers use SI for a variety of work. So imagine for a moment that you do mostly ad images but then suddenly, you land an arch viz job. Why would you run out and buy/learn and whole new system for one job? That's one reason someone might use SI for arch viz. Another is they might just like it better. So flexibility is important, to most freelancers anyway.

Currently SI offers the most flexibility IMO of any package. There's not much you can't do with it (even crowds now it seems).