SunpathICE - Coming Soon

Developed entirely in ICE, based on the sun position calculations in the Radiance renderer (as the original plugin), I'm proud to announce that an ICE Kinematics version of the sunpath plugin is almost ready. And with fully animatable parameters this time.

Just waiting for Softimage 2011 to be released so I can resolve a few bugs (due to kinematics being buggy and unsupported in 2010).

Descendants Animation & Grapes Growing Rigging Tutorials

Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.

Holger Schönberger posted a link regarding Descendants, an animated short, on the XSIlist. A pretty stunning piece of work done with Softimage I've decided to link to here. A detailed breakdown has been posted at CGSociety.


Growing Grapes Veins and Bottles - Rigging and Lighting from Florian Witzel on Vimeo.

Florian Witzel posted this growing grapes tutorial a while back. Its been embedded in Autodesk's underwhelming Softimage page on the Autodesk website since last year but I've only just come across this little gem. A full tutorial can be found here.

Both demostrate some very good examples of multi-pass compositing, something Softimage has been doing well for years. I think the 100 new shaders exposed in SI2011 will make this kind of set up even easier.

Softimage 2011 Preview

Softimage 2011 announced with ICE kinematics fully realised. It enables the intricacies of a rig to be contained (including the IK system) entirely within an ICE tree making it incredibly easy to transfer ICE rigs between different rigs and characters. THIS is a big advance and will really help all areas of rigging including rigs in videogames, a field which ICE has been criticised in the past for not being that useful.

There is also a new system for using/building Mental Ray shaders. Now you only need the source code and Softimage compiles it into a shader for you, automatically creating a SPDL and material node entry in the render tree, exposing all the parameters and allowing you to get on with it without the pain of having to seperately compile on specific platforms. As a result, over a hundred shaders that have (up until now) never been exposed in XSI, are now there. Including a IES/photometric light shader and all the features lighting shaders have gained since it was introduced as the built in renderer.

Face Robot has been updated to include automatic lip syncing. The main issue with Face robot in previous versions was that to use it in any meaningful way you needed to capture live performances and import the data. Many users (like me) don't have access to luxuries like performance capture systems. Now you just need the audio and you can generate the proper mouth movements for dialogue, reducing the lip syncing to a few tweaks. EDIT:  After seeing the GDC'10 presentation by the charismatic Mark Schoennagel, he pointed out a neat trick where you can lip sync to music tracks by singing the song yourself, generate the face robot lip sync from your take and then replace your voice with the original score. Sometimes with amusing results!

The Physx-based physics core in XSI has fallen behind in recent years but now it has recieved a full update to the latest version. Integrated into ICE with CUDA driven (nvidia GPU only) GPU acceleration, it apparently offers softbodies, full shape collisions with rigid bodies and more, all accessible from ICE.

Other stuff includes multiple camera rendering, render slate (which allows you to add text onto renders for play blasts, etc. Be nice to see render times on this.) UV unfold command gets some changes to speed up workflow including symmetry and the ability to reunfold individual islands instead of being forced to unfold and pack the entire object each time.

Pretty solid update for just 6 months work. The Softimage guys really do know what is needed and always surprise me. Of course, there is stuff I wish was in there but isn't yet (perhaps never will be) but I'm pretty sure this 6 month release will mean that Softimage 2012 could get at least a full years development. Then again maybe Autodesk are considering a major x.5 point release for all 3d applications in another six months, that only subscribers can benefit from (just to keep us locked into the subscription cycle.)

Lastly, the two seperate versions of Softimage and Softimage Advanced have vanished. There is now just one version of the software. It has 5 batch licenses for mental ray and comes as either a standalone or a network license (EDIT: no batch licenses with standalone version - thanks for the heads up, Stephen). I'm not sure how people with SI 2010 (not advanced) will upgrade or subscribe as of yet.

Just have to wait and see, I guess. Apparently, early April is predicted for release.

The Bendy One

The Bendy One from Jason Wells on Vimeo.

This was a speed test using an old project and some newish techniques I've gained. It was composited in XSI using the FX tree. I used my RM_Architectural compound to generate the seperate diffuse (albedo), specular and reflective, etc passes via channels. I used fast radiosity technique to generate indirect illumination from a blurred HDR map (frame rendertime less than 20 secs). I baked an Ambient Occlusion pass as a texture using rendermap and reduced the render speed of each 1270x720 frame to 2 seconds. The longest part for rendering was the glossy floor reflection which I reduced by limiting the reflective area with a weight map.

I used a radial gradient in FX tree to create a vignetting effect and blurred some duplicates of the specular pass to get glows on the highlights. I'll try to do some tests with DOF and motion vector driven motion blur next.

The Third & The Seventh

I've got to say this is probably the most incredible archviz/CGI moving imagery I've ever seen. God knows how long this took to render!

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Compositing Breakdown (T&S) from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

January 2010 - Softimage & stuff

Yep. Another year has started! Seemed to start a little slowly but its seems to be gathering pace now. Notable things that appeared end of last year and this year are (in no particular order):-

Monophyl - A very good new blog, full of interesting stuff including lots Softimage/ICE info and links. (Including links to all the studios currently using XSI)

Six Birds Rigging Tools -  Helge Mathee and co @ Six Birds Productions have released some excellent rigging tools in the form of a new python plugin. Includes fully features springs, new stretchy IK bones and other such delights!

LEAP - A short film by Dan Gaud - another talented XSI guy who does everything including directing, photography, production, special FX and colour grading. Direct link to movie here.

Redi-vivus - recently came back online with new tutorials for download. Unfortunately, the download and online sections are down at the moment but it should be back soon.

Tessendorf Ocean Waves - plugin got an update - awesome FREE ICE plugin that does spectacular ocean surfaces. If you're computer is up to it, of course!


Procedural City Engine Video - This has buildings generated procedurally INSIDE as well as outside. Finally someone could remake Damocles for the 21st Century or Elite for that matter.


EDIT: Alive - Creature Rigging Solution for XSI - Hot off the press - a custom character rigging solution plug in has just been posted by MerlinDigitalArt. His blog will be in the bloglist further down this page.


As for me, I started working back at my old employer and I'm storming on with prop art for the Black Mesa Source mod Which, although we had to announce that it wasn't coming out at the end of 2009, it's still going strong, don't have any doubt about that. Our announcement made the usual websites like Kotaku and some more unexpected ones like Wired magazines vaporware 2009 awards! (It got 4th place which we thought was REALLY cool.)


We also recently upgraded the website and it now has a new wiki and a new main website. Also, check out the fun at the lively Black mesa forums.

Kill It Kid

I don't care - this has nothing to do with CGI, Softimage or my stuff but I'm going to plug 'em anyway. I love their music and I've seen them live 3 times at various places in London (and wished them luck in person on the day they got signed to One Little Indian records). Their music is beautiful and I think they're getting some momentum this year with the release of their debut album and I hope they make it big. They deserve to, their song writing is amazing.

Myspace
Twitter
Buy their album here  or here or here or somewhere else!

Unity is now FREE

I've been looking into Unity recently and was seriously considering purchasing the Indie version, primarily because of its ability to run in a browser, but also because projects can be deployed easily to PC, Mac, Wii and even i-phone. And now with the release of version 2.6, it's been announced that the Indie version is now FREE to use. (The indie version was a cheaper stripped down version with a commercial license.)

Unity also features an excellent asset pipeline integration. While many engines make getting art assets into them a real pain, Unity works well. Assets are exported to project folders and unity converts them for you. Updating everything so you can focus on scripting, art and level design. It even has a well integrated physics engine and level/terrain editor. Even the documentation is pretty good.

With this announcement, its certainly the best low budget 3d game engine on the market and definitely worth a look.

Alternative to bevel

I say don't use the bevel. At all. Instead:

1. Press plus (numpad "+") to work in subdivision mode from the get go. (Times 2 if your computer can cope with it).

2. For the working viewport, go to the Camera Visibility (shift + S) > Attributes tab and turn on Polymesh hulls

3. Goto shaded mode.

4. Use split edge to create tighter edges on the subdivided mesh.

5. What defines the sharpness of the sub-d models edge is the distance the second edge or "inner" edge is to outer edge. So in the image above you can see that in the lower viewport, the left side has a second/inner edge causing a tighter curve while the right side is much softer.

6. With this technique using inset on an single polygon can have a similar result as using bevel. However, I recommend just using split edge and subdivide edges evenly.

Softimage 2010 SP1: dxfimporter and sunposition updated

Get the v2010 SP1 compiles of the:

DXFimporter plugins here

Sunposition plugins here

RTCompound: Architectural Framebuffers Compound

This is a rendertree compound that splits up the Architectural Shader over ALL the framebuffer channels. Something similar has been done but I thought I'd try it myself anyway.

What I've also done is created a couple of simple scripts that set up ALL the required channels so that all you need to do is plug in the RM_Architectural Splitter and hook it up like a normal mia_architecture node and your ready to render out a pass on floating point or non-floating point channels.

Lastly, I've left the names of the mia parameters as they are so its easier to cross reference with the param names in Mental Images Architectural Shaders manual.

Download here.

Convex collision mesh creation with Stanhull/Softimage

I use a number of scripts for speeding up the creation of collision boxes for Valves SMD exporter in Softimage. The process I follow is laid out below:

First you will need to download this file. Its called Stanhull. It's a simple program that spits out an obj file containing a convex mesh based on an input mesh (inside an .obj file). Extract and place in a folder of your choice. If you don't want to edit the script below use the path: C:\3d\Stanhull\ 

1. Create your physbox model components. I do this by breaking up the original model into roughly convex forms. You are limited to the number of these by default (to 16 I think) but you can overide the limit with a line in your .qc file. The $maxconvexpieces QC command can increase this.

2. Select the new convex model pieces and run the convex script:

    'Objdir = the directory you want the exported Obj to go to (change if you wish)
        Objdir = "C:\3d\Stanhull\"
        'StanhullDir = the directory you have put stanhull.exe in (change if you wish)
        StanhullDir = "C:\3d\Stanhull\"
        'NOTE: file is always created in the Softimage\version xx\Application\bin dir and always called hull.obj
        fileOutLoc = Application.InstallationPath( siFactoryPath ) & "\Application\bin\hull.obj"
      
        set list = GetValue( "SelectionList" )
        if list.count = 0 then
               MsgBox "Please select at least one polymesh object first!!"
               else
               for each item in list
                  logmessage item.name
                  name = item.name
                  if item.type = "polymsh" then
                      'select objects one by one and export
                     SelectObj name, , True
                     getObjname = Objdir & "convert.obj"
                     ObjExport getObjname, , , , , , , , , , 0, False, , , False
                     'set up s.ystem command to run Stanhull.exe
                     cmd = StanhullDir & "StanHull " & getObjname & " -t"   
                     cmdResult = s.ystem( cmd )
                     set inObj = ObjImport( fileOutLoc, 1, 0, True, True, False, True )
                     'select new object and set up geometry approximation as needed for .phy SMDs
                     SelectObj inObj, , True
                     MakeLocal inObj & ".geomapprox", siDefaultPropagation
                     SetValue inObj & ".geomapprox.gapproxmoad", False
                     CreateProjection , siTxtCubic, siTxtDefaultCubic, , "Texture_Projection"
                     FreezeModeling
                     end if
                 next
            end if

3. Now with the new convex imported back in, select them and remove automatic discontinuity from them all with the following script:

dim name
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
         MakeLocal ".geomapprox", siDefaultPropagation
         SetValue ".geomapprox.gapproxmoad", False
         end if
      next
end if

4. Lastly, I apply cubic UVs to all of the physics box objects by selecting them and running this script (below). Once frozen, they are ready for exporting as SMD files for compiling.

dim name
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
         CreateProjection , siTxtCubic, siTxtDefaultCubic, , "Texture_Projection"
         end if
      next
end if

freeze ALL. (You may need to add an image to the material).

New Ultimapper Options in Softimage 2010

Softimage 2010 has new Ultimapper options: now supporting the creation of bent normal maps, plus the full arrange of Ambient Occlusion shader options.

I did a quick test to see the differences between the available settings. The above image shows the resultant maps from the 4 combinations of options and on the image below how they look applied to the low resolution object in Open GL preview.

 

In this case, bent normals seem a lot smoother while the binormals map seems to result in a closer approximation from hi to low res sources in this case. The drawback with bent normals is they render twice as slow. However, I'm pretty sure that there is a case for each of these solutions out there.

SunPosition update for 2010

Updated for Autodesk Softimage v2010 (8.0.201.0).

Download it from here.

SunPosition 2010 demonstration from Jason Wells on Vimeo.

Colorspace/Physically correct colours in Softimage

I've noticed two blogs recently post tips on how to get physically correct texture colours when rendering indirect illumination (and using physical sky/sun shaders)

http://harrybardak.co.uk/sRGB.htm
http://kobayashystips.blogspot.com/2009/09/linear-workflow-in-softimage.html

Further discussion, etc about here:
http://community.softimage.com/forum/autodesk-softimage/rendering/softimage-gamma/page-1/
http://www.aversis.be/tutorials/vray/essential_gamma_01.htm

Isolating individual scene objects per pass

This is a pass setup I came up with to address a question posted here.

Basically, the query was how to remove individual elements from a pass but still have their reflection appear on other objects. So, in the image above the blue sphere is rendered in the reflections of the grey sphere, but is invisible in the pass.

Basic Setup: All the materials in scene should have a raytype switch plugging into the material node and the rest of the material tree plugging into all ports of the raytype node.

Then in your new pass partition you add an overide property and add the material-Ray_Type-eye parameter to it.

Press 7 with the overide selected and plug a constant shader with 0 for everything including Alpha into the overide node.

You can then drag and drop any objects you like into the "hide" partition and have them not rendered in primary but still appearing in reflections without having to tweak all their rendertrees seperately.

RENDERCHANNNEL alternative

Of course, this still leaves the guy who asked the question with 70 individual passes, so a setup using renderchannels must be preferable:

For every single material you can add a Store Color in channel node between the material node and the material tree and create a new render channel with a name like "blue". Then in the render region pick the channel.

In render manager > pass > Output - add all the new channels to the Render Channels Output list. The advantage is, of course that each individual renderchannel image gets rendered during a single pass.

With a combination of both methods you can break down the scene into its seperate parts by rendering a single multi-channel pass and then create passes as needed to isolate and re-render material changes as required.

dxf importer 2010

I've recompiled the dxfimporter 23 & 3d for Softimage 2010.
Get them from the usual place, here.

Bot Walk 2

Slightly different take on the bot walk. From scratch again, this time I tried to match the rig motion with foot motion, so it travels forwards and the feet sit on the ground. Again, only 29 frames...

Bot Walk 1

My second go at creating a walk cycle using a premade, free to use character rig from www.creativecrash.com (formerly known as highend3d.com)

Architectural modeling tools

Archtools for Softimage demostration from Jason Wells on Vimeo.

V2 released

-Cameras-
Fixed Polygon Cam (new) - create a view perpendicular to an arbitary polygon

-primitives-
Draw and size Cube, Box, Cylinder, Sphere, Cone, etc standard primitives in viewport

-transform tools-
4 point rotate
2 point transform
3 point scale
mirror about 2 points (new)
align objects by 2 polygons (new)
align object - polygon to edge (new)
aligh object to polygon (new)

Limitations: these do not work correctly on enveloped meshes unfortunately.

-measuring property-
Apply to scene root and measure distances - automatically converted to scales like mm, cm.

Download from here