Sun position for XSI 6 - beta

Please download this plugin for XSI 6+ from here.


Read the instructions in the readme file for installation and usage.

Residential Building 1 (reprise)

Yep. Rendered in Mental Ray in just under two hours at 2000 pix wide and tweaked in Photoshop comes my redo of the Residential Building 1 image:

Both images can be found at my portfolio at CGTalk - http://jasonio.cgsociety.org/gallery/

T-Gen for Softimage XSI - public beta

This is a plug in I've been lucky enough to have been a beta tester on for the last week or two.

What is it? To quote the T-Gen website:

T-Gen is the first tree and plant generator plugin fully integrated into XSI architecture. Over 100 appearance and distribution parameters, full utilization of XSI curves and node-based hierarchy ensures great flexibility and huge possibilities while creating your own trees and plants. You can use almost all XSI tools to additionally edit materials, geometry, hierarchy of all T-Gen objects. With powerful optimization tools you can create low-poly trees and plants for your games. Almost all parameters of T-Gen are animatable, so you can create animations of growing trees and plants.

Auto-rendermap script (XSI)

Here is a short script for automating the UV-mapping and rendermapping of any polymesh objects you have selected. Change the parts highlighted in red if you want better resolution textures to be generated (eg:512 to 1024). You can also add further rendermap options here like to render illumination only. The line in green is where the UVs are applied. This can be amended to suit various situations.

All rendermaps are automatically saved out to your project/Rendermaps directory.

Once rendermapping is complete, constant shaders are then applied to all the objects and the textures are reattached to the correct objects automatically.

Switch to textured decal in the viewport to see the result.

(Save a copy of the scene before continuing and use at your own risk)

'Make a rendermap on every selected object in scene

'completed between 10 & 11-06-07
'By Jason Wells aka Redmotion

dim name, imfile, oClip

set list = GetValue( "SelectionList" )
if list.count = 0 then
MsgBox "Please select at least one polymesh object first!!"
else

'start rendermap make routine - depending on scene size and object complexity this could take a while... :)
for each item in list
logmessage item.name
name = item.name
if item.type = "polymsh" then
SelectObj name, , True
'set up unique UVs with name starting with RM_
oUVs = GenerateUniqueUVs (, "RM_" & name)

AddProp "RenderMap"
SetValue name & ".RenderMap.imagefilepath", "Render_Pictures\RM_" & name & ".pic"
SetInstanceDataValue , name & ".RenderMap.uvprop", "RM_" & name

SetValue name & ".polymsh.cls.Texture_Coordinates_AUTO.RM_"& name &".PolyPackUV.targresv", 512
SetValue name & ".polymsh.cls.Texture_Coordinates_AUTO.RM_"& name &".PolyPackUV.targresu", 512
SetValue name & ".RenderMap.resolutionx", "512"
SetValue name & ".RenderMap.squaretex", True

logmessage "RENDERMAP generation starts for: " & item.name & " - please wait"
RegenerateMaps name & ".RenderMap"
logmessage "RENDERMAP generation complete!"
end if
next

'change the shaders for selected objects to constants and add RM_image
for each item in list
name = item.name
if item.type = "polymsh" then
SelectObj name, , True

'bring in all rendermap clips
imfile = "Render_Pictures\RM_" & name & ".pic"

oClip = "Clips.RM_" & name & "_pic"

ApplyShader "Material\Constant", , , , siLetLocalMaterialsOverlap
CopyPaste , imfile, "TransientObjectContainer", 1
SIConnectShaderToCnxPoint oClip, ".material.Constant.color", False
SetInstanceDataValue , ".material.Constant.Image.tspace_id", "RM_" & name
end if
next
DeselectAll

end if

Exporting directx files to Dark Basic Pro from XSI

Exporting environments as direct x files to Dark Basic Pro from Softimage XSI isn't that straightforward. But perfect results are possible:-

1. Make your scene, texture and lightmap as required.
2. Save the scene before continuing. Now flip the entire scene as follows:-
- create a primitive > polygon > cube
- make the cube the parent of all polygon scene elements
- scale the cubes Local Z scaling to -1 (flipping the scene) (EDIT: changed from X to Z)
- in explorer, drag all the scene objects back to the scene root
- delete the cube
- select all the scene objects and freeze all transforms



- export using the settings in the image below:


Tip1: Always export to the game directory. XSI will copy and convert all textures in the scene and place them here.
Tip2: Unless there are animated objects in the scene, uncheck export animation otherwise it will crash (and vice versa).
Tip3: Animation Type: Matrix Keys are bone based animation
Tip4: Animation Type: SRT are scale/rotate/transform animations (good for platforms)
Tip5: Complex character rigs will cause crashes. Use the simplest possible rigs for exporting.
Tip6: You can choose shrink textures or choose alternative formats.
3. You will now have a directx file and a series of .jpeg textures in your game directory.
4. Go to your art program (Photoshop or Gimp, whatever) and load up, flip horizontally and save all the scene textures.
5. Go to DBPro and run your model loader code:

Residential 1

Experiment with instances, architectural materials, low/fast FG settings, physical sky & sun shaders.

Posted at the XSI base forum and consequently made the front page. :)

Faster 2d .Dxf importer for XSI 6+ only

Download a new plugin for importing 2d dxf info into Softimage XSI v6+ from here: download.

Posted this on XSI base on April 6th 2007. So far there hasn't been much interest so development hasn't progressed much further.

Before using: Please note that all data to be imported should be FLAT 2D CAD data. For files with line information or DXF polymeshes that are in 3 dimensions, please use the previous importer for v5. See link on the right.

VERSION NOTES:

0.1 - new compiled c# based plugin for XSI version 6+ only - imports lines, arcs and circles

Tips for workflow: XSI struggles with displaying a lot of curves on screen (I have Radeon 9800 pro), so try to reduce the curve count as much as possible. Work with snap switched on. Holding down snap (ctrl) on the keyboard results in terrible lag with big curvelists.

**Please note** - this plugin does not run in a workgroup over a network - please install on local harddrive.

POSSIBLE ADDITIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION:
- block importing (to remove the need to explode everything in a CAD program)
- seperate layer data into seperate objects
- more elements
- rewrite 3d importer in C# to evaluate performance

FG & Architectural materials

This is a quick post of an arch-viz test render using Softimage XSI v6.01 and mental ray 3.5. It features hi-res textures from Arroway, the mental ray Architectural materials, zbump, physical sky and physical sun shaders and the new FG mode, multiframe (30 rays, 50 points, 0 max radius). Render time was around 20 mins with a image size of 1000x675. Some of the shadows still remain blotchy in places at these low FG settings, but it is a huge leap forward from the previous version (3.4) in terms of set up time. A little bit of post-processing was done in photoshop.

Softimage have now released a bug-fix release of XSI v6 - v6.01. It seems more stable but i've only been using it for a few hours.

News on a new Dxf importer for XSI 6

Ok. It's been a while since I posted, but the good news is that I'm
re-doing the dxf importer(for the last time) and possibly the sunpath for
XSI 6. They will only work in XSI 6 and above and will be written in C#
- a welcome new feature for XSI 6.

C# is a dream (yes microsoft can do something right!) . I've been tinkering on VS C# Express since the beginning of January and I've discovered a way to get dxf data into XSI in less time than the current script manages it.

We're talking an increase (based on a single test file) from one minute plus, down to less than 1 second!!
I've only got lines working currently, so all other elements are skipped. Expect the final version to be a little slower... Well, maybe a couple of seconds slower... :)

For a start, I've dropped the dotXSI format and opted for a conversion to EPS; the XSI EPS import option is faster and brings in curvebased drawings as a single entity. This speeds up importing AND displays in the viewport much faster that 10,000 seperate curves.

There are no import options now, just file selection. If you want to change the scale, just select the curvelist and type a new scale into the SRT.

If you need to import 3d, use the old plugin, as it isn't too slow with polymesh.

Investigating Softimage XSI 6 - Part 1

RENDERING

XSI version 6 is finally with us and it's a dream to use. The changes to the rendering set up are brilliant and although many of the changes seem like small things, they really help a lot with workflow. It is now much easier to work with procedural textures and shader networks as they can be previewed in the nodes and you can follow the transformations from one node to the next, all the way to the final result. I've wanted this for ages!

The new Render manager and Material Managers are infinitely faster than previous versions and can now be considered a genuine replacement for opening up explorer and the render tree in seperate windows.

FG has now changed drastically and gives an almost instant indirect illumination render of any scene by just turning it on - well, almost...

Setting up render channels isn't something I use right now, but it will be. It seems like it will be possible to render every single object in a view seperately, and then comp it all together. The offshoot of this will be altering a material could be done by rendering a small number of the overall buffers rather than the entire scene again.

MR & the render region is faster at rendering, can be done in multiple viewports simultaneously, you can render different render channels, and you can use a slider to compare between two different shader settings and revert to the preferred settings.

Now for some info on the pics:

These are from a quick animation I made using the new Physical Sky environment shader, new physical sun light shader, the new MR Architectural material shaders, ctrl_occlusion for sampling the environment colour for the "sculpture" - faster than using FG, the legacy day shader was mapped onto a sphere and made transparent to create an overlay of clouds, to add a little more interest to the sky. Finally, I used the simple tone mapping lens shader to balance the lighting out across the image.

Finally, expect a new version of the Sunpath plugin that works nicely with Physical sky and sun, sometime in the new year.

Adventures in Final Gathering

After two weeks of experimentation, I've finally got a result I am reasonably happy with. (See above). I've been looking for standard setup that will get me a high resolution print quality image rendered overnight, even at 3000 pixels wide (and on my clapped out old dual Athlon MP) . Originally, I hoped to solve this completely with just the right FG settings alone, but raising the accuracy and lowering the FG radius values resulted in either splotchy shadows or horrendously long rendertimes.

In the end, I settled for the FG settings returned by Automatic Compute (see below), an accuracy of 200, presampling density of 1 (the default - after trying everything from 0.1 to 0.9) and good anti-aliasing settings - this gave a very smooth shadow shading over large areas but missed out smaller details.

So to rectify this I used an Ambient Occlusion shader and Toon_Ink_Lens shader for the camera shader to get the detail missing from the FG solution. (If I render this again I'll use a seperate AO pass for better control.):-

acc 200
min 30 max 100 (rounded up from auto-compute result)
bounce 1
pre-sampling 1
filter 1
multiplier 1.5 1.5 1.5
trace depth 4 4 8
4:38:19.28 for rendering - 3000 x 2256 pixels
1:03:40.40 for computing finalgather points
AA= min 0 max 3 (mitchell) (0.101 0.101 0.101)

I used Photoshop 6.0 to bring back some of the contrast, and stick a little glow on the spots.

2 point perspective in Softimage XSI

I'd thought that this wasn't possible. But on sunday morning, I had the urge to post a request for info about 2-point perspective using XSI. Then I changed my mind and decided to see if I could work it out myself. Within about 20 mins I had the solution. I've posted it at XSI base.

Ctrl.Buffers

Ctrl studio are at it again. They tweaked and updated their Ctrl.buffers plugin which features, among other things, "tone mapping".
This technique easily brings Mental Ray into the same quality of lighting as other renderers like V-ray and Maxwell. (The attached image was created in Softimage XSI - but NOT by me, I hasten to add. :) )
You can find the v2.0 beta shaders at Softimage.ru along with some brilliant videos detailing how to use it. It's not exactly new news but I only just found it, so here it is...

Physical Sky addon released for Softimage XSI

A physical sky shader, originally developed for Maya has been ported over to Softimage XSI. Initial impressions are promising. Especially if I can fix the problems with the Sunpath XSI addon, I think these two addons would complement each other nicely.

Get it here.

4th Place for The Grand Machines

The Grand Machines demo wins 4th place in the Ageia Physx/Dark Physics software compo.
Download the demo here.

Dxf Importer for Softimage XSI 5.11

I'm pleased to announce that, as of today, the redmotion dxf import plugin is now finally available. It gives you the ability to load dxf files, either polymesh or basic vector information, straight into XSI.

I will be posting the announcement at XSIbase later on today.

EDIT: Download the .xsiaddon file from here.

The Grand Machines - development footnote

When I started the TGC Competition 2006, I was a bit worried about the deadline being far too short to make any sort of decent game (that I could think of). But early on, I found some alternative ways - to 100% hard coding - to make a reasonably slick camera and control system. In fact - it worked out far better than any straight coding i've tried in the past.

It also debuts the first implementation of a system I've been developing since around mid-September, which I have pretentiously dubbed the X-engine. It allows me to use Softimage XSI to design, model, texture, animate and set up the basic physics properties for an entire level and then export as a single direct x file. The game code then picks it apart and assigns the correct attributes to the different elements. Currently, the level-specific mechanics/events have to be hard coded, but I intend to switch to a scripting system asap.

The X-engine was created to speed up my work flow and more importantly; for allowing users to create and add their own levels (with ease) in the future. As you never know who will take your game and do something you never thought of. It's the ultimate source of user feedback.

TGC Competition 2006 entry - The Grand Machines - 3 level demo

Yesterday I submitted v.1.00 of my 3 level gameplay demo of "The Grand Machines" to the TGC 2006 Ageia Physx competition. The game is kind-of-a cross between Head-over-Heels and Marble Madness. It takes the co-operative 3d puzzle/platform elements of the first and the rolling ball physics of the latter. Yes, there are probably too many rolling ball games in the world, but it's been on my list o' game-things to do for ages.

EDIT: (Just submitted v1.1 - which adds a music track I created a few years ago.)

Stuka JU87 B-2

This is a WIP for the first of three german war planes I intend to model and texture to high detail.
Not sure what I'll use them for yet but they might feature in a future Day of Defeat:Source level.

Bontago!

Bontago! isn't anything to do with redmotion but is very interesting and inspiring if you're looking to enter the Dark Physics compo at game creators.
Ever wondered what tetris would be like in 3d crossed with war/strategy and physics? This is it! Get it from their website.