Softimage Wiki EOL
Update as of 20 Nov 2016: for some reason the Wiki is still available and the notice is gone. I wonder why. Regardless, you still have time to make a local copy of the portal, which is a good thing. Uhm... Thank you, AD?.. (-_-)ゞ
Just an FYI for all XSI-zealots like me out there.
Autodesk decided to stop hosting the Softimage Wiki portal due to... Well, who the heck cares anymore? I guess it's too expensive for a large international company to host a couple of gigs of files. At least they had the courtesy to warn us beforehand.
Anyway, there you go.
So if there's something you need from the portal you better make a local copy before Nov, 11.
High-Quality Cloth Simulation With Nvidia Physx Flex (Also Softimage Ice)
This is the first post demonstrating what NVIDIA PhysX FleX is capable of when it comes to high-quality simulations. I'm planning to show how it can be used for all kinds of simulations with the upcoming blog posts. Also a cool demonstration video below.
What is FleX?
FleX is a particle based simulation framework developed by NVIDIA for real-time visual effects. The idea is the following: instead of a having a bunch of solvers for each type of a body (rigid, soft, fluid, cloth e.t.c.) why not create a unified solver based on the concept of using particles (or “molecules” if you prefer) to represent the bodies? Then, make this solver work on modern GPUs to deliver unprecedented simulation speed and you can actually use the result for real-time simulations in games or interactive presentations.
Now, we all know what “real-time performance” means when it comes to the “offline” CGI... ;)
Maya 2016 ships with Arnold now. Good bye, Mental Ray
SIGGRAPH 2016 is full of surprises.
Autodesk announced that with Maya 2016 they decided to ditch Mental Ray and replace it with Arnold. I gotta say... Of all things AD did over the years...
This is kinda cool.
Still, AD being AD, batch rendering will cost you extra.
Luckily, interactive rendering (that is rendering from Maya) doesn't require a separate Arnold license. This means that Maya now comes with probably the most renowned production rendering solution (albeit CPU-only) by default.
Not bad... Not bad at all, AD.
Run and Rock-it Kristie now completely free on the App Store
Run and rock-it Kristie, a "rayman-esque" iOS platformer was the first game I released publicly. Making the game was quite an experience, but seeing people actually play it was something else.
Less than a week after release it was featured on the European App Store as one of the best games of the week for iPad which was cool as hell.
Over half a year has passed since and I think it's time to let everyone experience the whole game for free. In the initial version only the first tour was available free of charge, and it wasn't the most exciting one of them all, which didn't quite let people truly experience the game and its mechanics. Hence, last week I finally decided to remove the only in-app purchase from the title and make it free for everyone to enjoy.
So grab a copy of the game for yourself or your kids and have fun =)
And maybe... Just maybe... Android port of the game might be in the works ;)
HDR Image Manipulation for Free With GIMP 2.9
Lately I've been playing around with HDRI maps and creating my own 360 HDR panos to use for image-based lighting with Redshift.
I quickly realized that some of those maps would need to be tweaked a bit for a better result. For that you need some piece of software... like Photoshop for example. Unfortunately Photoshop costs money and even with subscription may not be the best choice for a hobbyist on a budget. Besides, Photoshop isn't the only tool on the market that can do this, right?
I then turned to GIMP only to find out that current stable version didn't support floating point image manipulation of any kind. What I didn't know was that GIMP team have been long working on the new color management implementation which would support HDR workflows and more!
Turns out a week ago they actually released the 2.9.4 version of GIMP with numerous improvements over the 2.8.x branch. At the moment it's only available in the form of a development snapshot in git, but if you wish to give it a go right away without compiling it yourself, you can try out the experimental GIMP builds from partha.com.
Using Cloth Simulation and Delta Mush Deformer for Skin Collision in Animation
I'd like to present the results of a study I conducted recently:
Story
Working on the animated short film I am constantly updating a list of tasks to do in order to achieve a descent final result. One particular topic took my sleep away recently when I remembered that in order to correct skinning errors on animated characters you'd either have to sculpt and then script a bunch of blend shapes or would need a muscle system available in your DCC software.
I then turned to Maya, which has had a muscle system for ages.
Maya Muscle system
Maya provides several deformers to manage soft- and hard-tissue interaction between muscles like smart-, self- and multi-object collisions. Even though they aren't terribly performant, they get the job done.
Unfortunately as soon as I would've used any of Maya's Muscle system tools I'd be tied down to a 185$ a month subscription plan for the whole duration of the project which would be outrageous. There is a lite-version of Maya available for indie gamedevs - Maya LT - which only costs 30$ a month, but it doesn't come with the Muscle system.
Hence I had to improvise and develop a simple and straightforward solution for this problem in a DCC of my choice.
VDB cloud with Softimage ICE and Redshift - a step-by-step tutorial
Since my first post about Softimage and OpenVDB was more of a brief overview than a tutorial, I decided to create a step-by-step guide on how to create a .vdb cloud-like grid with Softimage ICE using Mr.Core's (Oleg Bliznuk's) compounds and explain how they work on the way.
To follow the tutorial, download the compounds and connect the extracted workgroup in Softimage (File -> Plugin Manager -> Workgroups -> File -> Connect):
