My Wishlist for Softimage... maybe 2013 ?

[Hirazi Blue]

@Kzin - Insider knowledge or "pessimistic" outlook on the future?

[Kzin]

the xsi viewport will not feature fast rendering previews in the future.
also iray will not come that fast to xsi, so the best is to use arnold, or, if someone at ad has a good day, we will see the implementation of mr's progressive rendering.

How do you know what future holds? All I know things are pretty unpredictable and anything could happen (remember Avid -> AD).
Technology changes rapidly and I think such viewport interaction will eventually be a standard.
Many users can't get Arnold, but there's Vray™ also , so...

Softimage's program manager's current position is to not have iray in softimage. Not because it's awesome and must be reserved for Max, but because isn't so hot, and it isn't useful for most of the user base (everything must fit in the GPU RAM for using the GPU, no motion blur, no programmable shader trees, no particles, etc) and is costly to integrate and maintain. (It's not going to be in Maya either, afaik) The time that would be spent on that will be spent instead on the OpenGL Viewports, maintenance/stability of the current rendering engine, and helping third parties such as Arnold.

who would implement a path tracing render previewsystem in xsi when your final rendersystem does not support this tech and the shadersystems are different.
a previewsystem only makes sense if the preview and final renders are consistent. you have this with iray and mr for example because they use the same shaders. i know the limitation of iray. and luceric say why they dont go this way, because it cost to much to code a solution for xsi only.

so i think the short time solution could be the implementation of mr's progressive rendering feature, simply because mental ray is bundeled with xsi.

[Kzin]

@Kzin - Insider knowledge or "pessimistic" outlook on the future?

i dont hink we will see something like in the webtech demos in xsi, because it makes no sense to code a different rendering system then the implemented one.

[Memag]

who would implement a path tracing render previewsystem in xsi when your final rendersystem does not support this tech and the shadersystems are different.
a previewsystem only makes sense if the preview and final renders are consistent. you have this with iray and mr for example because they use the same shaders. i know the limitation of iray. and luceric say why they dont go this way, because it cost to much to code a solution for xsi only.

so i think the short time solution could be the implementation of mr's progressive rendering feature, simply because mental ray is bundeled with xsi.

I did not say it will be implemented, I just posted the link because I thought it's cool stuff. However, things constantly change and evolve, nothing will be impossible in the future.
Truth is, I couldn't post in "Open Discussion" due to some "service unavailable" error, so I posted in "2013 wishlist" thread as it was most appropriate place, in which I was able to post it.

edit:

This is interesting as well.

[Kzin]

I did not say it will be implemented, I just posted the link because I thought it's cool stuff. However, things constantly change and evolve, nothing will be impossible in the future.

Cheers

it would be great to have something like this in xsi, wishlist is right, but i think no one will hear you. ;)

[face]

Many thinks can be done with a custom display host.
Also the implementation in the existing preview window is possible and working ;)

face

[bottleofram]

This is interesting as well.

Its certainly making a case for moving lighting/rendering out of the general 3D packages.

On other note, Hirazi pointed out here how developers struggle with soft's name and I claimed AD got it wrong. In that video, Softimage basically gets 3 mentions for the price of one so I think I should eat my words. It was a brilliant decision after all. (sorry for the offtopic)

[luceric]

maybe this is obvious because I'm a programmer, but there is no link between that water demo and iray.
it's very easy to write a demo that make interactive water on a grid and casts rays at the bottom of a pool. people have been doing it since the Amiga, and it's even easier now with OpenGL. I had one that ran on DOS and looked exactly like this one. there are a lot of real time ray tracing demos out there. that's not a generic renderer, it's one custom effect and you can't use it in production unless that exactly the effect you need and have no other requirement. in any case, whether you agree or not, iray doesn't do that. iray is not a magic thing that turns things real-time. its goal is to use cuda to accelerate arch viz, and it's not real time ray tracing either.

[ActionArt]

I don't think anyone is expecting real time rendering, hopefully just faster, especially previews however that can be accomplished.

For the viewport, it would be nice if we could get color management, shadows, a little better transparency, perhaps the option of reflections and some form of GI even if they're not realtime but fill in like progressive rendering. If it could use the same shaders as the final render it would be useful.

For final rendering, perhaps some GPU help (similar to PantaRay). It seems it's not yet practical to do everything on the GPU but perhaps some things could be handed off like AO calculations, maybe area light shadows, and volume particle shaders. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how possible this is but shops like WETA seem to be doing it already so maybe that can trickle down to the average user at some point.

Anything that could accelerate the volume particle shader would be sooooo nice. I'm sitting here waiting for a preview right now so that's why I have time to type this

Just wishful thinking...

[andyboe]

built-in soft effectors! please!

[caledonian_tartan]

Beeing able to choose the EXR compression format!!! (RLE)

[gustavoeb]

Beeing able to choose the EXR compression format!!! (RLE)

Beign able to set options for ALL types of images for that matter... And the API should allow options for each Render Channels also.

[iamVFX]

Viewport antialiasing...

[Kzin]

Viewport antialiasing...

this works, you have to force the aa thru your display driver settings.

[iamVFX]

Viewport antialiasing...

this works, you have to force the aa thru your display driver settings.

Thanks, I'll try that!

[azurecgi]

Boolean tools that don't fail or lock up with heavy geometry (even if it means freezing the modelling stack)