V-Ray for Autodesk Softimage

Looks like this amazing plugin for Softimage is almost Built on V-Ray’s core platform of rendering speed, stability, and quality, V-Ray® for Autodesk® Softimage® is an advanced rendering solution for the VFX and animation industries. V-Ray for Softimage includes ICE support, efficient Global Illumination, versatile shaders, and much more.

V-Ray for Softimage: General Overview - February 2012

V-Ray for Softimage: V-Ray Materials - February 2012
Shading with V-Ray for Softimage - Create materials quickly and efficiently using V-Ray Materials, and simplify the creation of complex, layered materials with the V-Ray Blend and V-Ray Car Paint Materials.

V-Ray for Softimage: Render Elements - February 2012 
Render Elements - Take control of your compositing workflow using the expansive list of Render Elements.

V-Ray for Softimage: V-Ray Proxy - February 2012
V-Ray Proxy - Manage scene memory and efficiently render massive amounts of geometry using V-Ray Proxy objects.
 

V-Ray for Softimage: Hair & Fur Shading - February 2012
Hair & Fur Shading - Render hair and fur with unprecedented quality, control, and speed with the VRayHairMtl shader.

Chaos Group products are licensed per machine and with one V-Ray for Softimage license you can start and use V-Ray GUI and tools inside the platform, start one local render job, speed up batch rendering using up to 5 render slaves with V-Ray Standalone or up to 5 render nodes with Softimage batch.

The official suggested end user price of a single new license of V-Ray 1.5 for Softimage is 890 Euro/ 1230 USD/ 770 GBP

V-Ray for Softimage

Yep. You read right. Chaosgroup announces Vray for Softimage beta. You can sign up for the beta here.


Audi R8 Spec Commercial from LemonGood on Vimeo.

The V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Program will run for a period of approximately 2 months, starting on September 28th.

Softimage supported features

• ICE support support - render geometry produced by the award-winning Softimage ICE system, including particles, strands, hair, ICE-managed color arithmetic, all fully animated.
• Animated parameters - V-Ray will efficiently render Softimage objects with animated parameters and an arbitrary number of keyframes. All geometry modifications and many color-oriented animatable parameters are supported.
• Strong render tree support - V-Ray supports dozens of the procedural shader node types for the Softimage render tree, and new ones are added on a regular basis and made available through service packs.
• Weightmaps - apply transformations to geometry or color attributes of a scene on a per-vertex basis with full support for Softimage weightmaps.
• V-Ray Sun and Sky - create realistic outdoor scenes with physically accurate lighting and atmosphere effects, while maintaining control over rendering times.

V-Ray supported features

Shading

• Support for efficient material layering.
• VRayCarPaintMtl.
• Support for PTex textures.
• V-RayToon shader.
• Support for dispersion in refractions for VRayMtl.

Lights

• Physically accurate lights.
• Efficient illumination from HDR environments.

Camera

• Lens distortion through Nuke displacement maps.
• Option to turn off camera motion blur.
• Shutter efficiency for motion blur.

Render output

• Support for additional render elements.
• Output of multi-channel scanline OpenEXR files with data-window.

Effects

• Depth of field with bokeh effects.
• Accurate motion blur.

Scene translator

• Support for .vrscene output for rendering with V-Ray Standalone.

Supported platforms

Softimage 7.0
Softimage 7.5
Softimage 2010
Softimage 2011
Softimage 2011 ASP
Softimage 2012
(64-bit supported on all platforms)

Softimage 2012

What's New in Softimage 2012

New features in Softimage 2012 include:

• ICE Modeling: Create procedural geometry in the Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) based on a set of rules, conditions, and parameters. 
• Enhanced Everyday Workflows: Enjoy greater overall productivity and ease of use, with across-the-board enhancements. The Texture Editor, Explorer, Schematic View, Scene Layer Manager, Render Tree, Bone Primitive, Reference Models, and Weight Editor have all received attention. 
• Syflex on ICE: Use the power of ICE to achieve greater control and flexibility over Syflex cloth simulations. 
• UV Unfolding: Save time and effort with new UV relaxing and pinning options. 
• Lagoa Multiphysics: More easily achieve plastic, liquid, soft-body, cloth, and foam-like effects. 
• Stereoscopic Support: Take advantage of the trend for 3D films with an in-viewport stereoscopic viewer offering a range of display modes and stereopscopic camera rig. 
• Single-Step Suites Interoperability: More easily take advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites Premium 2012, with new single-step interoperability between Softimage and Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, and Autodesk®Mudbox™ software. 
• ICE FX Builder: Create and modify sophisticated effects more quickly and easily, with the help of the new ICE FX Builder. 
• ICE Subframe Sampling: Calculate collisions more accurately in ICE simulations, with new support for subframe sampling on a per-object or per-point cloud basis. 
• Vector Displacement Map Support: You can use mental ray® rendering technology to render complex high-resolution details created in Mudbox 2012 software or certain other applications on low-resolution geometry. 
• New ICE Compounds, Preset FX, Shaders, and Model Library: More easily create a wide range of effects and rendered looks in ICE with the help of new compounds, shaders, and pre-defined ICE FX that can be used “as-is”, or customized as required. 
• Maya nCache Support: More easily transport geometry and ICE simulations between Softimage and Maya 2012 software. 
• Consistent F-Curve Editor: More easily switch between multiple products in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites Premium thanks to an updated F-Curve Editor that provides a toolset that offers more consistent functionality and terminology for editing animation curves. 
• Polygonizer: Build liquid and blobby effects with the new Polygonizer toolset. 
• SDK Enhancements and Events: Facilities can now more easily customize and extend their tools and pipelines, with the exposure of more core Softimage services and events: Undo Bracketing, onCommand Events, and onRenderPass Events. 
• Softimage Composite: Softimage® Composite toolset offers keying, tracking, color correction, raster and vector paint, rotoscoping, warping, advanced filters, a full 3D compositing environment, and tools that help support stereoscopic productions. 
• MatchMover Professional Camera Tracking: Extract 3D camera and motion data from video and film sequences in order to insert CG elements into a live-action scene. 
• FBX 2012: Through support for the Autodesk® FBX® 2012 asset exchange technology, artists can transfer stereo camera rigs, vector displacement maps, multiple UVs, and subframe samples for icecache and PC2 in and out of Softimage, making it easier to safely pass production assets between products. 

A set of new view videos can viewed now over at the Softimage blog.

ShiVa3D-made "Convergence" on TI OMAP 4

Stonetrip's Shiva3D engine can create stereoscopic 3D games optimised for Texas Instruments OMAP 4 platform for mobile devices. This demo, first shown at Mobile World Congress, 14-17 February 2011, shows Convergence.

If you've any doubt about Omap4's performance check out the benchmarks recently posted by Anandtech.

pmG's Messiah:Studio - Dare To Share ™ $10 Challenge

Yep. If you've not heard about it by now, where have you been?

pmG are offering Messiah:Studio for $10 and $40 respectively.

Yes, that is $40 instead of $1195.

When the progress bar gets to the end, its over. Make sure you don't miss out!

Go here to find out more.

EDIT: The Challenge was met!

Congratulations !

We Dared. You Shared. You won.

February 14th 2011

114 Countries. 35,000 hits. 103,000 combined views. Multiple records broken.

In 7 days you have left your mark on the history of the internet, and made a lot of people happy

Congrats to everyone who entered!

Pooby's ICE Tutorials

Paul Smith has recently uploaded several very informative ICE tutorials, further expanding peoples understanding of just how flexible and near-all encompassing ICE is for solving general 3d problems. Here's a couple of notable ones:

11: Making a displacement viewing tool from Paul smith on Vimeo.

5: Simulation continued - the Jiggly bit from Paul smith on Vimeo.

Incase you've never heard of Pooby, this is one of his more well-known works:

Greg 2 from Paul smith on Vimeo.

PS: BTW, we're still waiting for that muscle system tutorial, Paul! ;)

Back Muscle test from Paul smith on Vimeo.

Lagoa / Arnold demonstration

Mark Schoennagel of Autodesk shows off a sneak peek of a beta version of Arnold, rendering insanely fast inside of Softimage. 3,200,000 spheres rendered with an ambient occlusion shader in mere seconds. 


I don't know which is more impressive, the near instant arnold rendering or the 3 million spheres simulated with Lagoa.


A discussion at Xsibase can be found here.

ShiVa 1.9 released

Stonetrip is running two webinars on Wednesday 3rd Nov 2010 to introduce and inform newcomers and current users about the release of Shiva 1.9. Click here for information about these webinars.

ShiVa v1.9 (by Stonetrip) is due to be released this week (as far as I can tell). ShiVa3D is a 3d development platform taylored towards anyone wanting to create 3D real-time applications and games for Web, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, Android, Palm, Wii and the iPad. ShiVa is a powerful multiplatform 3D game engine, WYSIWYG 3D Editor and MMO Server.

It is probably the closest competitor to Unity3d which also offers a single editor/GUI for creating games and 3d applications for multiple platforms including the Web.

For the indie user, however, ShiVa's main advantage over Unity is that it enables you to develop for all aforementioned platforms for at a very reasonable price. Unity still charges individual prices for each platform.

In regards to using Softimage with it: Shiva imports DAE files but animated files exported directly from Softimage can be problematic. Shiva's importer purges duplicate keyframes and Softimage's export has no straight way of tweaking data (randomising keyframes) so that third party apps do don't do this.

I discovered this when I did some tests here:
http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=20690

Export options for Collada 5.1:

Several apps can process Softimage-exported DAE files correctly. Ultimate Unwrap 3d is one of them.