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[mirkoj]

well we can dream....

Arnold dreams.. eheh

not THOSE kind of dreams shame on you!

[bottleofram]

They cant keep up with mental ray let alone some other renderer. The only fair and somewhat plausible solution would be to offer a version of software without the renderer. Than the customer wouldn't feel cheated when investing in a third party render solution.

But they wont do that because: a) they have contract with nvidia and b) it would require far too much work with all the bundles they've got (bundles are unique products for AD).

[Bullit]

At time AD choose Mentalray there wasn't nothing else so well established and maybe so easy to port - from CAD to DCC.
Now they have all that development is much difficult to change.

[mirkoj]

we can easily ignore mray now.. it is updated at slug speed, most of other renderers offers a lot more than mray now so no need to even talk about it really.
only problem is if AD is paying to nvidia and userts to AD just to have it in software.
but this is all other story.

[Kzin]

well we can dream....

Arnold dreams.. eheh

not THOSE kind of dreams shame on you!

yep, that would be a great thing, cant wait the big eyes of all the users because arnold breaks inkompatibility one more time and things dont work anymore.
keep in mind that arnold is a production renderer, with all positive and negativ things. bad that most people dont want to understand what that means.

why is ad using mr? because it works for all their software. there no other renderer out there which is that versatile. instead of complaining it would be better to participate more to make mr integration and also feature set works better. this would need some time to write a mail or two to let ad know that the people WANTS improvement instead of complaining the whole time. complain, this is ok, but on the other side let ad directly know why you are complaining, otherwise, it would be the tree thats falls in a wood in which no one can hear it.

[Rez007]

on FaceShift.. any idea why FaceRobot development stopped completely? Why not work on Softimage implementation of connecting Facerobot and Kinect2 or any other kind of video based face capture?
You were rigth before that AD brought Facerobot toground but after that there wasn't a single improvement in workflow and need to even today work on separate head mesh animate point bake and import is really out dated...
Till now it should be made a lot more seamlessly and easier to work with FaceRobot heads inside scenes.

One by one all SI great features are getting outdated and nothing is done to work on those features any more.

You took the words right out of my mouth, and I couldn't agree more. Why would Autodesk spend R&D money on this when they could have used that money to improve FaceRobot, when most of the work was already there...Seems very ironic when Autodesk keeps saying it is "all about the Suites." It seems to me, that it is only about the Suites if the end result is Maya. I rarely ever see a video where it says start in Maya and "send to" Softimage, it is almost always the opposite. This time though, they seem to skip FaceRobot and Softimage entirely.

[bottleofram]

You took the words right out of my mouth, and I couldn't agree more. Why would Autodesk spend R&D money on this when they could have used that money to improve FaceRobot, when most of the work was already there...Seems very ironic when Autodesk keeps saying it is "all about the Suites." It seems to me, that it is only about the Suites if the end result is Maya. I rarely ever see a video where it says start in Maya and "send to" Softimage, it is almost always the opposite. This time though, they seem to skip FaceRobot and Softimage entirely.

Faceshift isnt an Autodesk product so they spend nothing on RnD there.

The question is fair though, and Luc-Eric would be far better positioned to explain this, but if we have to guess, it's just that FR was developed by Blur and probably no one who ever touched its code remain at AD by this point. Just like Lagoa, basically. They licensed it but thats as far as it will go (especially now that Tiago has moved on to different things...).

[iamVFX]

Just like Lagoa, basically. They licensed it but thats as far as it will go (especially now that Tiago has moved on to different things...).

The stupidest thing they could do is to lock the Lagoa Multiphysics compound. And they did it.

[jamination]

You took the words right out of my mouth, and I couldn't agree more. Why would Autodesk spend R&D money on this when they could have used that money to improve FaceRobot, when most of the work was already there...Seems very ironic when Autodesk keeps saying it is "all about the Suites." It seems to me, that it is only about the Suites if the end result is Maya. I rarely ever see a video where it says start in Maya and "send to" Softimage, it is almost always the opposite. This time though, they seem to skip FaceRobot and Softimage entirely.

Faceshift isnt an Autodesk product so they spend nothing on RnD there.

The question is fair though, and Luc-Eric would be far better positioned to explain this, but if we have to guess, it's just that FR was developed by Blur and probably no one who ever touched its code remain at AD by this point. Just like Lagoa, basically. They licensed it but thats as far as it will go (especially now that Tiago has moved on to different things...).

I don't think FR was developed by Blur, I believe they helped shape it to fit their needs. I believe Softimage had a special projects team or something to that effect, however I think its safe to say no one who ever touched its code remains on the softimage team.

[McNistor]

The stupidest thing they could do is to lock the Lagoa Multiphysics compound. And they did it.

Really?! WOw.....

[bottleofram]

I don't think FR was developed by Blur, I believe they helped shape it to fit their needs.

I seem to recall reading that they had a hand in it. I'll be happy to admit i'm not sure i've got that right.

[luceric]

took the words right out of my mouth, and I couldn't agree more. Why would Autodesk spend R&D money on this when they could have used that money to improve FaceRobot, when most of the work was already there...Seems very ironic when Autodesk keeps saying it is "all about the Suites." It seems to me, that it is only about the Suites if the end result is Maya. I rarely ever see a video where it says start in Maya and "send to" Softimage, it is almost always the opposite. This time though, they seem to skip FaceRobot and Softimage entirely.

Face Robot has had Maya interop since the start, including a maya runtime rig. No need to use for Send To.

But it's kind of weird to say, to cut the head, export it and launch in Softimage so you can run Face Robot, to use a rig that could have realistically been made in any app. It's not a product that makes a whole lot of sense unless it's to replace an in-house facial animation tool in a pipeline, which is how it was thought. (It was indeed designed as a special project with Blur as the client) Otherwise there are roadblocks between the user and the result. And it might help if face robot had really fast playback, which it does not. And especially supported non-human face. There is just a lot of work to do there, and not a lot to keep.

We did think we would work again on face robot (last time I worked on it was for Softimage 2011, lipsync+linux port, which isn't that long ago actually), but as far as I can tell FR wasn't a success, so the plans were put on hold. IMHO if something is there but there are big workflow problems, or you don't use it for another reason X, than you can't use the words "great feature" to describe it. that's not what the word "great" is for. Maybe you could say it's a great marketing, great idea or great feature name. That said, it's not impossible that Autodesk will look at this subject again, it doesn't have anything else like that (Motionbuilder (perhaps other app too) does have phoneme recognition lipsync feature, don't know if they're used)

[Rez007]

Thanks for the response, and it makes sense...I didn't know about the interop with Maya. However, the point you make about how FaceRobot seems limited is basically what I was getting towards when I mentioned that Autodesk should have "improved FaceRobot" instead. I just don't know why they would spend the money to either license and eventually support a new product, when one of their main DCC apps offers something almost the same in their Suite. Couldn't have Autodesk possibly been better served by putting that money towards FaceRobot to make it much more robust, by opening it up more to accept rigs of any kind without having to cutoff the head, increasing the playback speed and possibly pushing it even further to encompass the full body, etc? I thought FaceRobot was one of the coolest things in Softimage and I would have loved to see that developed further, and I thought the lip-syncing addition was great too. This move to me by Autodesk just shows even more what they plan to do in the future with Softimage...just hard to grasp I guess since they owned the technology for quite a while and ditch it for something very similar that runs with Maya.

[Sil3]

but as far as I can tell FR wasn't a success, so the plans were put on hold.

Maybe the "unrealistic" release high price point of $100k was one of the reasons hehehe ;)

I only worked with FR once (already integrated into Softimage) and I though of it to be a very closed System, I couldn't even add my own corrective Morphs on top of it. It simply would not accept them... and yes... the speed feedback was awfull.

Its a pity to probably never seen it developed further and see it accepting all kinds of Face/Heads Forms other than Humanoids. Seems a constant on all Special Projects on Softimage... things get developed and then they stop, wasn't that what happened to the old (forgot the name) XSi Crowd system as well?

Just out of curiosity, since FR what happened to the Special Projects Team? I think we never heard of them (M. Isner etc) anymore after the release of FR.

[Rez007]

...
Its a pity to probably never seen it developed further and see it accepting all kinds of Face/Heads Forms other than Humanoids. Seems a constant on all Special Projects on Softimage... things get developed and then they stop, wasn't that what happened to the old (forgot the name) XSi Crowd system as well?

Sure seems like it, as the list is starting to get kinda long...FaceRobot, ICE IK, Lagoa, ICE Modeling (possibly, as it is still kind of new)...I just see some very nice features that have great ideas behind them, but get left to collect dust and not touched, or if they are, very minor. If these things would actually get seen through into further developement I think Softimage would be more in the forefront.

[luceric]

but as far as I can tell FR wasn't a success, so the plans were put on hold.

Maybe the "unrealistic" release high price point of $100k was one of the reasons hehehe ;)

I mean success after we added it for free to Softimage 2011. you guys tell me if it took off or not.

Just out of curiosity, since FR what happened to the Special Projects Team? I think we never heard of it anymore after the release of FR.

It's just a cool name for consulting, so whoever was still in the LA office (which was tiny) in 2008 was merged into Autodesk Consulting.