 | | | Maya Particles.. My thoughts. | Maya Particles.. My thoughts. 2005-05-06 - By Vince Fortin
Back
Cool thread! Hey I'm late as usual ;)
Do you guys feel like everything has been said concerning XSI
particles weakness and strengths, and, along with what Andre
mentioned, past development on this module has been resumed to
catching up on other software features?
I'm not ranting here but sharing the fact that I'm concerned about
what will happen to the next particle system update maybe simply
because my career choices depend partly on that.
I understand fx might not have been a big marketing priority in the
past but I'm confident that if SI wants to take back big fx studios
with them, they will come up with a brilliant procedural and open
simulation system.
On that aspect, it's quite amazing how Side Effect seems to have
managed to overcome every possible scenarios a technical artist could
think of...
Right now working on Fantastic Four (cheers Matt!) and using Maya...
slowly incorporating Houdini for fx only. It's solid. The good thing
for Soft is there's plenty of wicked stuff on the market to get
inspiration from.
I thought I could share some of the features I miss the most since I
left XSI particles:
+ integrated rendering features, rendertree connections. Even if these
features are hardly customizable without shader programming knowledge
+ use size for collision
+ rotation, simple but highly missed in Maya
+ (almost) per-particle force weight
+ inter-particle collisions
+ fcurves on per-particle attributes
...and some of the ones I enjoy the most about Maya's particles:
+ access to cache data
+ collision events indexes
+ oversampling; allowed custom connection to the time
+ ability to set/query instanced objects on particle; ability to see
them in the viewport
+ ability to display ANY pp attribute in the viewport is so nice for debugging
+ geometry-shaped forces (still lacks the custom shapes feature that
was in Dynamation way back)
+ also there seems to be a perfect coherence between particle IDs and
indexes. That allows to pipe-in many things in the shape node while
seeing it update correctly. Particle clouds are all about
birthing/dying components.
'nuf said, cheers!
Vincent
P/s: One more thing... Andre, what do you mean exactly by "the risk of
dependency cycles" with pEvents ?
On 5/5/05, Felix Gebhardt <gebhardt@(protected)> wrote:
> Actually I remember Bradly Gabe talking about something that sounds like
> a general flow field back in 2002.
> See Bottom of the message:
> http://www.softimage.com/community/xsi/discuss/Archives/xsi.archive.0211
/msg01060.htm
>
> It's relative easy to implement and we would have this and probably more
> already if there would be a C++ API that would allow for integrating
> custom forces without writing a particle system from scratch. Well,
> beside dynamic user interaction in the viewports where you would need to
> write a paint system via the graphic sequencer from scratch.
>
> It's a "give them a fish or a fish rod" thing and all my votes go for
> something that helps us helping ourselves.
>
> F.
>
>
> Eric Lampi wrote:
>
> >I was impressed, then he blew me away by showing me
> >how he can define direction and speed vectors with
> >brush strokes... So F-ing cool! That's a really
> >powerful feature, and I know XSI has all the nuts and
> >bolts to make that happen.
> >
> >
> ---
> Unsubscribe? Mail Majordomo@(protected) with the following text in body:
> unsubscribe xsi
>
---
Unsubscribe? Mail Majordomo@(protected) with the following text in body:
unsubscribe xsi
|
|
|